Feature Request - Optional hreflang integration

[JayHoltslander]

It would be nice if the option to use or not use alternate hreflang was available as an on/off selection within the plugin's settings.

On this page "How To Make Sitemaps In Multiple Languages With WordPress" it reads...

According to Google you can indicate that the French URL is equivalent of the English page using hreflang attributes basically in two ways:

A. HTML link in header …
B. Sitemap …

IMPORTANT: Google recommends choosing only one way to implement hreflang annotations, in order to avoid errors.

So it would seem that things are currently set up fine by Transifex. HOWEVER, we would prefer to utilize multilingual sitemaps over the hreflang in the head method.

Justifications:

• Which is the best choice for SEO sitemap for multilingual website?
  "The Official Webmaster Tools blog explains the advantages of using the multilingual sitemaps declaration rather than on page: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/multilingual-and-multinational-site.html"

• Multiple XML Sitemaps: Increased Indexation and Traffic
  "...sure enough, the number of pages sending traffic shot up, more than doubled (486 to 1240). The same with keywords sending organic search traffic, more than doubled (548 to 1347). Nothing could be attributed to a fluke keyword or page, just everything went up. This is the power of good indexation and giving the search engines some help."

• Use a sitemap to indicate alternate language pages
  "If your site targets users in many languages and, optionally, countries, you can use Sitemaps to provide Google with rel="alternate" hreflang="x"."

Currently we can disable it within includes/lib/transifex-live-integration-hreflang.php by commenting out lines 114-138 but that will be undone by the next plugin update.

Aside: Yoast SEO doesn't have support for building multilingual sitemaps. They need to be generated with another tool like Dynomapper (Which does detect Transifex' multilingual pages and builds a sitemap including them.)

[matthewjackowski]

So the current logic adds hreflangs if you enable the 'rewrite' logic in the UI. However a specific toggle to control this was added to the config, but not enforced (see

transifex-live-wordpress/includes/transifex-live-integration-defaults.php

Line 118 in 9229557

'hreflang' => false,

)

I don't remember why I pulled it out specifically (maybe because hreflangs are only able to properly generate if you are using the rewrite logic, so why not just always do it if you can), but it should be a simple change to also add a logic check for that setting without commenting the render code in includes/lib/transifex-live-integration-hreflang.php

Unfortunately adding a control for this in the admin UI is considerably less simple.