Case study · Indexing recovery
From duplicate to definitive.
Fixing the canonical, hreflang and redirect problems behind a sharp fall in search visibility on a multilingual travel site.
Own productTravel discovery platformGlobal · 12 languages
The challenge
Thousands of pages.
Few indexed.
The platform had grown to thousands of pages in twelve languages. Many of the language versions were not truly translated. Search engines saw large numbers of near-identical pages, and visibility in Google fell sharply.
Search Console showed the cause. Thousands of URLs were reported as duplicates or alternates, and thousands more were crawled but not indexed.
The approach
One canonical.
Languages earned.
Search engines index pages they trust to be distinct. Untranslated duplicates in many languages undermine that trust.
Read the signals.
Use Search Console reports such as “alternate with canonical”, “duplicate without user-selected canonical” and “crawled, not indexed” to size the problem.
Canonicalise to one version.
Point untranslated locale pages to the English original instead of presenting them as separate pages.
Switch languages on page by page.
Add a rollout switch so that a language becomes indexable only when its translation for that page is real.
Clean up crawl waste.
Block internal search URLs from crawling and change hundreds of redirects from 308 to 301, which Bing handles more reliably.
What changed
Clear signals for search engines.
Each page now tells Google and Bing which version is the original and which translations are real.
- Duplicate and alternate URLs addressed
- ~9,000
- Languages under controlled rollout
- 12
- Redirects corrected to 301
- 680+
No more duplicate locales
Untranslated pages consolidate signals to one original.
Languages that count
Translated pages are indexed as genuine alternates.
Less crawl waste
Crawlers spend time on pages that can rank.
Indexing recovery takes time and is still being measured; no traffic uplift is claimed here.
Ross’s role
Own product
Ross diagnosed the problem from Search Console and Bing Webmaster data and designed the fix as founder of the platform.
Published October 2026 · By Ross Brannigan
A potential collaboration
Fix your international SEO.
For multilingual sites where translations, duplicates or redirects are holding back search visibility.
- An indexing and hreflang audit.
- A canonical and language rollout plan.
- Monitoring in Search Console and Bing.
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