Easyling release notes June, 2024

Some would argue that the middle of the year is the nicest it can be. That’s certainly the case for sunny Budapest. This month our focus was on the JavaScript translator engine. We added options for configuring SEO and additional protections against ingesting unwanted content. Read the details below the fold!

Search Engine Optimisation

Hreflang links are crucial for SEO. They allow webmasters to specify what language a given document is. This obviously helps search engines send users to the correct, translated site as needed. W3Schools explains how they look here.

By default, both the Proxy and the JavaScript translator engines add additional elements to specify where the source language is and where the other translated pages may be. However, it’s possible that you want to have more control over them. In that scenario, it’s best for you to handle it on the source site as those changes are mirrored to the translated site too. And to avoid our systems editing your perfect SEO magic, it’s now possible to turn off this default behaviour for some or all of the elements we add.

We’re still working on the user interface for this feature. We aim to get it out to you as soon as we can. Meanwhile, if this feature sounds like something you’d like to try, drop us a line at support@easyling.com.

Ignore by tag with prefix

Under Advanced settings → Ignore, you can select to ignore elements by their HTML tags, IDs or classes. With classes, you could already use wildcards, like user-* to filter out the user’s name, email adress etc. However, this wasn’t available for the other two, IDs and tags. This month, we extended the tags support with these wildcards.

Why is this a big deal, you may wonder. It’s important in conjunction with the Report new content options that we recently released. With this turned on, the JavaScript translator engine will verify that the content displayed on your website is all ingested and ready for translation, every time someone visits your website. This way, you are notified about new content even faster than you would with a daily scheduled crawl. The feature, however, has a small drawback. If a piece of content is visible on the site, it’ll be picked up as content to be translated. Some browser extensions work by adding additional popups. The most notable one is Grammarly. The way it works, content that your users typed may become ingested. Luckily, it puts all its content in tags that start with grammarly-*. With this update, we can exclude them all.

We made sure that on new projects, such Grammarly-generated content is excluded by default. However, on older projects, it may be needed to manually go back and add this rule to Ignore tags.

Miscellaneous

And last but not least, we have multiple smaller things that we addressed:

• We introduced and quickly fixed a bug where in the Workbench, the translations would not be visible.
• We changed new projects to use only GET HTTP method during crawl, HEAD requests will be avoided because many servers do not support them. This does not affect existing projects.