Appending "hsLang" to all links? What is this?!

[cristigheorghe]

For one or two days we've observed yet another unannounced change in the way links for HubSpot COS websites are handled. Now all the internal links get a parameter appended, namely the hsLang. This request returns a 301 "moved permanently" with a location header of the original URL (without the parameter).

This is bad for the following reasons:

• it's not OK from an SEO point of view
• it breaks custom functionality that we have implemented using HTML5 History API to load portions of content via JavaScript from a HubDB table without the need to refresh the page. Now, with the 301 redirect in place our functionality is rendered useless by this redirect.
• linking to cross-language resources, now turns into a 404 error. Example: linking from a localised page to an english resource, due to this hsLang addition, the link is pointing to a resource that doesn't exist, thus the 404.

Is this a bug? Is this a temporary patch which will get removed?

Come on HubSpot - these things are pretty critical, you cannot just change them and release them to live without at least notifying your dear users.

[TonisTroubles · Accepted solution]

Hi, not sure if you allready figured this out but there actually is an option to enable this.

Go to Settings - Domains & URLs. Open tab Language Setting and enable Language specific redirects.

[MKisielewska]

Do you mean hsLang is a bad thing?

[Fabian_Attard]

But I want to have the language redicrects turned on. The issue is that I want a specific section not to.

[MFrankJohnson]

Yes @TonisTroubles, we found this article from Oct, but don't remember it being clearly updated back in May when this thread posted ... 

- see How can I manage multi-language content with HubSpot?

Thanks for updating this thread. (very helpful)

Best,

Frank

[IlkkaTuominen]

Anyone figured out what would be the benefit of using this feature?

'Quite a confusing little switch to begin with – I can't see anything but negatives in turning this switch on. 

[MFrankJohnson]

Does my post help answer your question?

Help the Community by marking it as SOLVED

Q: Appending "hsLang" to all links? What is this?!

More Questions: 

Checked HubSpot COS pages across four (4) client portals (in US and UK) and our dev portal (in US), but haven't seen what you've described (yet?) @cristigheorghe ... 

Is there any way you can maybe show an example link and the context within which it was generated?

 

---

www.MFrankJohnson.com

Please include @MFJLabs if you'd like me to respond.

[cristigheorghe]

Hi @MFrankJohnson Thanks for the fast reaction.

It might be that this only affects pages with localised versions.

Here's the example of our main website:

https://www.twispay.com/

You can check the links in the menu or footer.

One particularity of them is that we create our links through HubL, as we have a multi language site, and we need to look at content_slug to determine the language of the site, and know which further links to load.