Sitemap for multi language website

#11998
  • Resolved Marco Barthel
    Rank Math pro

    Can Rankmath create sitemaps that comply with Googles suggested way of providing sitemaps for multi language websites? I am referring to https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en. The specifics can be found in the tab Sitemap.

    This is my case: A website is available in separate versions (hreflang and canonicals are in place) for Switzerland, Germany and Austria. We aim to rank the correct URLs in the national version of search engines. So for example domain.com/at/demo should rank in Austria whereas domain.com/de/demo should rank in Germany. It used to work fairly well but lately we see more and more wrong rankings. Using sitemaps as per recommendation by Google could fix the issue and I wonder if Rankmath can be used to do that? We are currently using Yoast but would be happy to switch anyway.

    Here is an example from the Google support page:

    <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
    <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
      xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
      <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="de"
                   href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="de-ch"
                   href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="en"
                   href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>
      </url>
      <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html</loc>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="de"
                   href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="de-ch"
                   href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="en"
                   href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>
      </url>
      <url>
        <loc>http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html</loc>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="de"
                   href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="de-ch"
                   href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/>
        <xhtml:link 
                   rel="alternate"
                   hreflang="en"
                   href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/>
      </url>
    </urlset>
Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Hello,

    Thank you for contacting Rank Math today.

    This is a great suggestion! I have passed this on to our dev team and hopefully this will see its way into the sitemaps module sometime soon.

    Looking forward to helping you. Thank you.

    ​​​​​​

    Thank you Michael for passing it on to the dev team.

    Hello,

    Google understands the current method as well where we show the default language in the Sitemaps and when they crawl those URLs, they see the hreflang tags of the translated versions.

    We are sticking to the current method as the other method will require complete revamp of the Sitemap module, which is not something we will be doing anytime soon.

    In the meantime, if there’s anything else you need help with, please let us know.

    Thank you.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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