Washerhelp Posted March 29, 2022 Share Posted March 29, 2022 Hi there. I keep getting emails from Bing Webmaster tools telling me there are a "large number of pages pointing to the same canonical URL". When I investigate, they list the following - / (root) ?lang=de ?lang=dk All of which point to my homepage. Could you tell me does Invision forums create any redirects that could account for this? I've scoured htaccess files and Invision control panel but cannot find anything, yet there is no doubt that the ?lang= URLs are definitely redirected to the home page. This makes no sense to me, not only because of the duplicate content but because I would have expected for example the ?lang=de to redirect to a German page, otherwise what is the point? I should add that my homepage is not the forums it's a sparsely populated WordPress page so if this is obviously nothing to do with Invision please accept my apologies and I can delete it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Washerhelp Posted March 29, 2022 Author Share Posted March 29, 2022 12 minutes ago, Washerhelp said: the ?lang= URLs are definitely redirected to the home page I just realised that if I add the ?lang=de to any of the pages on my forums they display the correct page albeit in English, so that could explain why Bing says that there is a large number of URLs pointing to the same canonical URL if all pages on my forums somehow have redirects for ?lang=de and ?lang=dk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jim M Posted March 29, 2022 Share Posted March 29, 2022 The query string of "lang" does not do anything in our software. The switching of languages on the community requires actually more behind the scenes which is facilitated by a form submit. If you have a third party plugin which has this present or anything else directing the crawler there, this is not intended and would need to be removed. However, there should be canonicals present to the core page which the crawler should honor. Here is a screenshot which illustrates that: If you are not seeing this you will want to double check and remove any customizations which you have performed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Washerhelp Posted April 1, 2022 Author Share Posted April 1, 2022 Thanks Jim. I can't see any reference to "discussion/?lang" but there is only one incidence of lang in the source of a forum topic page and it's in the header - <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en-GB" dir="ltr"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> I have no 3rd party plugins. It's strange because if I add ?lang=de to even the url of this forum and this topic, the page displays as normal like it does on my forum. For some reason, Bing webmaster tools is saying there are urls to my pages with ?lang=de and ?lang=dk that are redirected to the proper page causing duplicates. Google webmaster tools doesn't warn me about it, so I thought it must be an anomaly with Bing tools, but their tech support just said to contact my developer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Stridgen Posted April 1, 2022 Share Posted April 1, 2022 That what you are looking at there is just the html header, and is not related in any way to what you are referring to Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Washerhelp Posted April 1, 2022 Author Share Posted April 1, 2022 Thanks Jim. I couldn't work out which file your pic referred to. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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