Using SureRank With WPML, Polylang, or TranslatePress

SureRank works alongside the main WordPress translation plugins and adds language information to your sitemap and meta tags automatically. This article explains what SureRank does on a multilingual site and what to check after setting one up.

No extra configuration is needed. SureRank detects a supported translation plugin on its own, so there is nothing to switch on.

Supported Plugins

• WPML
• Polylang
• TranslatePress

If you use a different translation plugin, SureRank still outputs meta tags and sitemaps for your content, but it will not add language annotations automatically.

What SureRank Does Automatically

Once a supported plugin is active, SureRank:

• Adds hreflang annotations to your XML sitemap, so search engines can see which URLs are translations of each other.
• Sets the language on your schema output and Open Graph tags to match the page being viewed.
• Lists translated URLs in the sitemap rather than only the default language.
• Leaves a page out of the annotations when no translation exists for it, rather than pointing a language at the original.

Note: Your translation plugin also outputs hreflang tags in the page <head>. That is expected. The tags in the page head and the annotations in the sitemap serve the same purpose for different consumers, and search engines accept both.

Checking Your Sitemap

1. Open your sitemap index at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml.
2. Open one of the post or page sitemaps.
3. Confirm your translated URLs appear, each with an hreflang annotation.

Tip: View the page source rather than the rendered table if you want to see the annotations themselves.

Setting Meta Titles and Descriptions per Language

How you set per-language meta data depends on which plugin you use.

• WPML and Polylang keep a separate post for each language, so open the translated post and set its meta title and description in the SureRank panel as you would for any post.
• TranslatePress translates at the URL level rather than creating separate posts, so there is no second post to edit.

TranslatePress and Translated SEO Metadata

TranslatePress handles translated SEO strings through its own SEO Pack add-on. With that add-on active you can translate your meta title, meta description, social metadata, and slugs inside TranslatePress.

SureRank supplies the original SEO metadata for the page. TranslatePress then translates those strings. Without the SEO Pack add-on, your translated pages will carry the original language’s meta title and description.

Troubleshooting

• Translated URLs are missing from the sitemap – Confirm the language is published rather than draft in your translation plugin, then rebuild the sitemap.
• A language you excluded still appears – Check any path exclusion rules in your translation plugin, then rebuild the sitemap.
• The sitemap looks stale after a translation change – Clear your page cache and CDN cache, then reload the sitemap.
• The hreflang code does not match a custom language code you set – On TranslatePress, SureRank builds the annotation from the published language code rather than a custom code override, so you may see a regional code such as en-GB where you configured en. Your page level tags from TranslatePress remain correct. Send us the URL if this affects you.

Next Steps

To see which content is included in your sitemap, read Which Pages Are Included in Your SureRank Sitemap.