Language switch is broken after renaming pages.

[Rajumuddana]

HI All,

I have a scenario, my client has renamed few pages in one languages which is causing Language switch failed to navigate to right page.

I have pages like

/content/abc/en/home.html

/content/abc/fr/home.html

After renaming the FR home (from /content/abc/fr/home.html to /content/abc/fr/domicile.html), language switcher failed to resolve the same page from EN -> FR.

How to address this issue, to make sure Language switch works again without effecting SEO?

I tried

Approach:

I used ‘alias’ on the renamed page (FR Home) same ‘name’ as EN Home page.

Which resulted

/content/abc/fr/domicile.html sling:slais = home and adjusted the Sling model code to fetch page path with alias or actual name, vice versa.

Pros: This fix works for all pages globally with same scenario.

Cons: This may affect SEO, since the ‘actual page name’ is hidden/masked by alias.

Worst case, should I ask my client rename them back to original to align with EN pages?

Can you guys suggest better approach?

Thanks,

Raju.

[giuseppebag]

How and where are the page links being computed? Could this be a cache issue? Have you activated all the pages that contain the language switch to ensure that the URLs are updated as well? 

Have you checked if the component exhibits the same issue when accessing the page directly via its IP address? 

I apologize for the numerous questions, but I want to ensure I fully understand the scenario.

[BrianKasingli]

Hi there, we have worked on a large scale AEMaaCS website using the Language Navigation Component, and indeed we have utilized that advanced page properties "alias" as the page name to resolve the issue.

So for example, we have french and english websites

• /content/sourcedcode/ca/en/contact-us
• /content/sourcedcode/ca/fr/contact-us

We wish to have a more meaninful name for the french website, so we use the alias feature of aem

• /content/sourcedcode/ca/en/contact-us
• /content/sourcedcode/ca/fr/contact-us -> ALIAS -> /content/sourcedcode/ca/fr/contactez-nous

In summary, when creating multilingual pages in AEM, the English and French page node names should be identical. To present different URLs for each language, leverage the Alias feature in AEM as what I have implemented on my project. This allows you to maintain consistent internal structure while displaying language-specific URLs to users. Even though the French page node is named /contact-us, setting an alias to contactez-nous ensures that the public-facing URL appears as /contactez-nous, both in the browser and sitemap.xml (when using AEMaaCS’s built-in sitemap generator). This alias-based URL is what Google will index and rank, not the original node name. Using Alias also ensures that your backend is not confused about the fundamental content structure which correlates to locale and translations in the JCR. However, note that the original /contact-us path will still be technically accessible on the French site unless you implement redirect rules; to avoid confusion or SEO duplication, configure redirects from /contact-us to /contactez-nous on the French site and Ensure /contact-us is excluded from the French sitemap.xml after aliasing is enabled.

I hope this helps; I would not rename pages... and use the ALIAS feature.

[Rajumuddana]

Hi @BrianKasingli ,

Thanks for the quick response.

So, the suggestion or correct way is, don't rename pages but use the alias instead.

Then, i'm gonna ask my client rename the pages back to original (sync with other language page node name) and then use the name what they preferred as 'alias'. 

by the way, we are using AEM 6.5.

Thanks,

Raju.