Hello dear community! I’m running a multilingual Discourse forum in English, Russian, and Italian using Content Localization with content_localization_crawler_param enabled. AI translations are working well. Crawlers receive translated content via ?tl=, and the forum correctly outputs hreflang tags for those URLs. However, on translated pages like ?tl=ru, the canonical still points to the base URL instead of to itself. That seems to create an SEO conflict. Google’s hreflang documentation says not to canonicalize to a page in a different language, and many SEO sources say hreflang on non-canonical pages may be ignored. So the concern is simple: ?tl=ru is treated as a duplicate only the base URL is canonical the Russian page is not indexed as its own page so its hreflang may have no practical effect My main question is: Is the intended goal of Content Localization + crawler param to let translated pages rank in Google for their respective languages? If yes, shouldn’t ?tl= pages use self-referencing canonicals? If not, then what is the purpose of outputting hreflang tags and serving translated crawler content on those URLs? For comparison, Reddit uses a similar ?tl= approach, but their translated pages appear to use self-referencing canonicals, which is why they can rank in local-language search results.

Hey, agree with you. Each language variant should be self-canonical. We’ll have a look.

We’ve added a fix - FIX: Self-canonicalize tl= translated pages by nattsw · Pull Request #39494 · discourse/discourse · GitHub - and it’s available in our newest build. You can update your site - we’ll also be monitoring here for meta.

Great! So if I just update the discourse from the admin panel, I will get this fix in my Dicourse? Is this correct?

Páginas traduzidas não rankeiam no Google. Mortas pelo CANONICAL. Localização de conteúdo + ?tl=

Suporte ao Produto

nat (Natalie T) Abril 24, 2026, 7:07am 7

Sim, isso está correto.

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Páginas traduzidas não rankeiam no Google. Mortas pelo CANONICAL. Localização de conteúdo + ?tl=

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