SEO-Friendly Language-Aware Internal Links

S

stefan

New member
Hi @lutish ,

I have a suggestion to improve internal navigation and SEO in the Multi Host System.

Currently, when a visitor is browsing a translated version of the forum, clicking an internal link inside a post or private conversation can take them back to the master language because the stored URL does not contain a language prefix.

Example:

Current page (English):
https://example.com/en/threads/example-discussion.123/

Internal link:
https://example.com/threads/another-discussion.456/

Clicking this link takes the visitor back to the master language instead of keeping them on /en/.

Suggested solution:

Would it be possible to automatically rewrite internal forum links to match the visitor's currently selected language?

Ideally, this would:

  • Rewrite internal links server-side when rendering posts, quotes, signatures and private conversations.
  • Use the correct translated destination URL, including its language prefix and translated URL slug.
  • Preserve query parameters and anchors.
  • Leave external links and the original stored URLs unchanged.
  • Keep Canonical and Hreflang handling unchanged.
This would allow visitors to remain in their selected language without unnecessary redirects.


One more question about translations:

Does the Multi Host System currently support automatic translation of XenForo profile posts and comments on profile posts, or is this feature planned for a future update?

I believe these improvements would make the multilingual experience more consistent and improve internal SEO.

Thanks again for your continued work and support :)!
 
For the user-generated URLs here: I don't see any value in having our Multihost translate or process them. They sit inside member profiles, and from a XenForo standpoint, member pages carry far too much content to be worth indexing — 99% of sites exclude them entirely, and the 1% of users who don't care will, as their member count grows, end up joining the 99% anyway.


As for signatures displayed in thread messages: they are generally crawled by Google, but the vast majority are nofollow links, so there is no point in processing them at all.
 
Hi,

The main issue is that visitors lose their selected language when clicking internal links in forum posts or private conversations.

For example, a visitor browsing /en/ clicks a link pointing to the German master version and is switched back to German. All subsequent navigation then continues in German.

Expected behaviour:
Internal links should automatically use the visitor’s currently selected language, including the translated URL slug.

For example:
Ideally, links should be rewritten server-side without modifying the original URLs stored in the database. External links, query parameters and anchors should remain unchanged.

This would improve both multilingual navigation and SEO by linking directly to the correct language-specific URLs without unnecessary redirects.

Would this be possible to implement?


Thanks!
 
stefan said:
Hi,

The main issue is that visitors lose their selected language when clicking internal links in forum posts or private conversations.

For example, a visitor browsing /en/ clicks a link pointing to the German master version and is switched back to German. All subsequent navigation then continues in German.

Expected behaviour:
Internal links should automatically use the visitor’s currently selected language, including the translated URL slug.

For example:
Ideally, links should be rewritten server-side without modifying the original URLs stored in the database. External links, query parameters and anchors should remain unchanged.

This would improve both multilingual navigation and SEO by linking directly to the correct language-specific URLs without unnecessary redirects.

Would this be possible to implement?


Thanks!
Click to expand...
We can't tell whether a user is intentionally or unintentionally linking to https://example.com/fr/threads/autre-discussion.456/ — and when someone posts this FR link on an EN site, we can't tell either. What if it's intentional?

If we force restrictions on these links, we'd be damaging the original content the user posted — and in practice, it would create other problems as well.
— which is why we dropped it back in the BETA version.
 
a visitor browsing /en/ clicks a link pointing to the German master version and is switched back to German. All subsequent navigation then continues in German.
this is current display language way
 
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