Add x-default tag to <head> for default/fallback locale #13361
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I didn't know this a few days ago, but I was asking myself the same question. This is not the first time someone reports odd results in Google, even here (#12238). On my side, I usually get French or English results but sometimes I get Arabic or Spanish results with no reasons... As I was saying on Discord, another thing to consider is the use of I mean I still think we should experiment with IIUC, this is something doable through a route data middleware so we don't need to override the I'll ping @delucis because he might have more information (if he's already explored this for Starlight), but I think it makes sense to experiment this for docs. But it's also possible that it's just a Google issue (on their end I mean)... I don't remember seeing that with other search engines. |
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This is all in Starlight’s logic so might be best addressed upstream so that the solution is available to all users, not just in Astro’s docs. Couple of things spring to mind:
Given that, I’d favour experimenting with the canonical change first. If we wanted, we could do that in Astro’s docs as a first step, and then if we see it is successful we could upstream the change to Starlight. |
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Noting that one issue we may face if we make this change is with our site search indexing with Algolia. IIRC Algolia excludes non-canonical pages from indexing. That would mean that fallback content would not show up in searches. For example, currently if you search for “Typescript” on https://docs.astro.build/pt-br/ you will get the untranslated Typescript page as a result. If I’m not mistaken, we would lose that behaviour if we point canonicals to |
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Yeah, all Google docs page talk about a language selector landing page. But, some other websites suggest to use to define the preferred version of a page. For example https://ahrefs.com/blog/hreflang-tags/ in "Implementing hreflang tags using HTML". And, looking at Google docs source code I can see: So, it seems they use it without a language selector landing page. Now, I'm not sure this is enough... I still think fallback pages could be considered at duplicate because the majority of the page's content is indeed the same. Now, if updating the
Yes, that was my thinking too! Because if it doesn't work or if this is worse maybe we don't want to impact all Starlight users. 😅 |
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Here’s a branch that would do the canonical bit: https://github.com/withastro/docs/compare/chris/canonical-experiment Could also add the Not going to dig into it more immediately given all the v6 stuff happening, but something to look at in the future. |
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@ArmandPhilippot - Please ignore the blog writers at Ahrefs and even the developers behind developers.google.com (they do not always follow the advice of their own Google Search team). @delucis is correct in that, according to Google's own documentation, the
-- Google (Gary Illyes) |
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Currently, there is no
x-defaulttag in the for the documentation pages. This would define a default or fallback locale for when a suitable language could not be found by search engines.Relevant chats:
I believe this could be the reason why some people see irrelevant translations getting returned in SERP. I, for example, often see Italian and Arabic docs in my search results. My browser language is set to
en, and my location isnl.I'm suggesting adding a
x-defaultto the with the value of the English version of the page to hopefully solve this issue.Beta Was this translation helpful? Give feedback.
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