Multilingual sitemap for TranslatePress

[Rik44444]

Hi,
we use your plugin The SEO Framework for our SEO. We love it: it is free (until we get more revenue, when we will start paying) + superlight.
For site translation, we were on Polylang before, which worked well with The SEO Framework, it gave us separate sitemaps for each language.
We have just switched to TranslatePress for translation, which is better than Polylang. However, we appear to have only 1 sitemap now with Translatepress, it is located here: https://giveforgood.world/sitemap.xml . We have 4 languages installed, but the sitemap only shows our base language.
We read the TranslatePress page here on how to fix this: https://translatepress.com/multilingual-sitemap-wordpress-site/ But we could not really find a solution. It says it should all work automatically with 1 of the SEO plugins they collaborate with (does not include The SEO Framework).
Is there any way we could keep The SEO Framework + to fix our sitemap problem? Or do we need to switch to one of the SEO plugins TranslatePress works with? If the latter: pls consider this a feature request for building support with Translatepress. I think it would be beneficial for you, they appear to be a growing and professional translation plugin. https://translatepress.com
best,
Rik

[LeBaux]

Hello! I see your founder is also Dutch, just like ours! Nice. Ours is spending the holidays with family and it might take longer for him to reply. I apologize for the inconvenience and although I could probably answer your technical question, I leave it up to him and focus on the project itself, if you allow me. I lead marketing, but realistically I sit on 25 chairs and try to help Sybre where I can.

I had a glance at your website and I have to say that our companies' values line up almost perfectly. I'm willing to give* you a free perpetual premium licence and lend a hand (if needed or asked) myself without monetary compensation... but there are strings attached. Or rather questions.

What is in it for you? What is the angle? Why you made giveforgood.world in the first place? I'm asking because we were burned before, offering help to non-profits and organizations that we hoped existed to help others, but turned out to be some tax dodge, or nefarious effort where the only goal was enriching some immoral douche. I read your tax FAQ, and your annual report and it seems like I should be paying you, not the other way around.

This is WAY more important than the sitemap problem you think you have (but likely don't). Your website should convey why and how more prominently and dispel doubts instantly. I had to scroll and click a whole lot to get to the numbers and I'm still not quite sure. I found a founder interview in Dutch, with no subtitles, it flew at me in pretty janky animation and while it probably has all the info I need, the animation made it scroll past it and the Dutch make the video useless for anyone who is not Dutch.

If I may offer you a slice of free SEO advice -- make the problem I described go away. I'm not looking down on you or disparaging your work -- almost all information is already on the website and you did a tremendous amount of work. It is clear as a day. But there is so much!

Now YOU might be asking why WE want to help you. Read the third paragraph again, please. You probably asking yourself the same questions about me. Society is sceptical of companies and people who just want to help and it's the biggest marketing and SEO hurdle good companies and non-profits have. I work for several.

That leads me to TSF's angle. We are serious about accessibility. We try to put users ahead of profit where we can. We are knowingly tanking our revenue 6 years in a row because we care beyond the SEO. I'm personally against rampant consumerism, vegan, pacifist... I'd like to think I'm serious about helping the planet, animals and good humans. And of course, I'd like to think I pass for an actual SEO expert.

But you never know, more often than not, charitable efforts are a scam.

What I'm throwing around here is not a hot-button issue that needs to be solved now. I implore you to investigate and vet TSF further (only 2 guys, not a lot of work). You can reply here, or email me, lebaux at our company name dotcom.

Lastly, I want to be perfectly clear that we always hoped that being charitable, caring about accessibility, offering the same support to unpaid users and giving will help us earn more. It really does not work that way, you have to fight for everything, even if you are giving yourself away. You probably know that yourself. What makes good people and companies is the relentless pursuit of decency, not profit.

So anyway, if you want, we can hop on the call later and sort it out, or you can just wait for Sybre to solve your technical issue and you won't hear from me ever again. Have a calm, peaceful and accident-free end of the year!

[Rik44444]

Dear @LeBaux , thanks for the kind message and offer, much appreciated. We will gladly accept both the premium license and a hand with our SEO! We are fully run by volunteers at the moment, so all extra help is most welcome. Thanks for the offer!

Re your questions: we are very definitely a legit non-profit: we've made it impossible for ourselves and future boards, employees and volunteers to profit from Give For Good (except regular salaries of course in line with others in the nonprofit sector). It was consciously setup as a charity: we really are doing this to help make a difference.

We try to explain why we built Give For Good on our homepage, but in a nutshell: we make it possible for regular donors to donate to charity in a different, more smart and effective way. We do this by investing people's donation in green and social stocks, and then transferring the interest each year to the charity/charities that people choose. This is not a new system: it is something that large donors already often do (via trust funds) and also large philanthropic foundations, universities, etc. What is new about Give For Good is that we make it possible for everyone to donate in this way, starting at 5 euro (instead of at 50.000 euro, which is about what you need to start a trust fund).

This way of donating has three major benefits:

1. The charity gets a stable, annual income they can count on (useful for strategizing)
2. Over time, the interest becomes much more than your original donation (see this example on our website)
3. The transfers of interest to the charity continue forever. All thanks to a one-time donation!

Yes, I've been a bit aware of the social nature of your business, partly because you make the base part of your plugin available for free, which I've always really appreciated! Great to hear a bit more about it: motivates me more to stay with your plugin in the future (is it described on your website already?)

I'll gladly have a call to understand better what you think we can improve about our website. As noted, we are all volunteers at the moment, so we are happy with any help we can get. What is the best way for us to exchange contact details - perhaps you can drop us a message here and then I will email you with a proposal for a date/time, does that sound OK?

thanks again and happy holidays,
Rik

[sybrew]

All the ethics aside, we should stick to plain facts here on GitHub. @LeBaux please keep the engagement of this kind on Reddit and Twitter.

TranslatePress does not store translated pages in the database conventionally, so TSF can’t retrieve those for generating a sitemap. This also means we cannot store metadata for it conveniently — if at all feasible.

TSF can read the pages queried and provide automated SEO for those out of the box. TranslatePress, in turn, correctly provides hreflang meta links to your pages, so the translated versions will be found by search engines and have automatically attributed languages for indexing. TranslatePress also provides proper data to WordPress, which TSF can use to generate metadata.

It is not impossible to implement extended sitemap support. Still, it isn't a requirement for indexing/ranking, and therefore not worthwhile investing many hours adding special support for their plugin, for which the compatibility may break at any point.

[Rik44444]

Ok, so in summary: i don't have to worry about this, it won't hurt our SEO?

Just for info, several others SEO plugins do appear to create multilingual sitemaps with TP:
https://translatepress.com/multilingual-sitemap-wordpress-site/

[sybrew]

That is correct.

I don't really care about the other SEO plugins. They add features just to be hip and try to appear greater than they are, their developers haven't proven to me they are skilled in either programming or SEO.

Still, in this case, TranslatePress Pro appears to be doing the extra work; see https://translatepress.com/docs/addons/seo-pack/. Since that feature is locked behind a paywall, I cannot affirm whether they do a good job at it or not. There's a specification for this feature, and we abandoned it, for it would cripple sites: #69.