@Tavis yes, the "recent posts" and "popular posts" modules that are on most blog templates will only include posts that match the language of the listing page you're looking at 🙂
I'm very excited to announce that multi-language blog is now complete!
We've loosened restrictions in blog settings so you can have different templates, comment settings, and more, for your different blog languages. These updates will ensure that you avoid mixed language blog content, and will help long-time blog users adopt some ofour new multi-language blog functionality.
With the new blog settings, you can now....
Set a different template for each language used on a blog.
Set different options for each language variant of your blog's comments, social sharing, and Google AMP settings.
Create an individual blog post that isn't in the blog's primary language and isn't part of a multi-language group of posts.
Set a multi-language blog post to be the primary post for a multi-language group of posts, or remove it from its multi-language group.
Combine Existing Blogs.
We have some final updates to come for APIs, but all in-app functionality is done! I'm marking this post as Delivered.
Quick update, we're in the process of adding this update to all customers' portals! It's currently out to 20% of all customers (as of Oct 2, 2020), and we'll continue to increase that percentage over the coming 1-2 weeks (we do this incrementally to minimize the risk of bugs affecting customers' accounts). If all goes well, I expect you'll see this update in all portals around mid-October.
You can tell you have the update when you click on the More button for a language variant and you see options to make that post "primary" and to "remove" that post from the group.
Yes, I'm happy to say that we're in the process of adding this update to all customers! It's currently out to 20% of all customers, and we'll continue to increase that percentage over the coming 1-2 weeks (we do this incrementally to minimize the risk of bugs affecting customers' accounts). I can add your client, just send me their portal IDs 🙂svalsdottir@hubspot.com or DM me here.
@finn thank you for that feedback! Control over the URL of a blog tag listing page would go well with some other changes my team would like to make to listing pages (mainly letting users set a meta description or page title for those tag listing pages or author pages, for example). I'll make note of your point about the URL as well.
Customization of the URL aside, I am surprised to hear that special characters in URLs is not good SEO practice - I did consult with the internal SEO team here at HubSpot about this a while ago and was told at the time that special characters are actually nice to have. This was in the context of pages and blog posts, where users can edit those special characters and replace them with more 'simple' Latin-alphabet characters, so to your point you don't currently have that option with tags. I'll revisit this and see what I can find, but in any case do agree that customization of the tag page URLs would be ideal 🙂
Blog subscriptions can be managed for each language of the blog
Language switcher module works on the blog listing page (since July 29, 2020)
Multi-language Authors (available to all as of August 12, 2020)
Multi-language tags (currently "rolling out"; becoming available to more portals every day. Expected to be available to all on August 20th)
Still to come:
Ability to group existing posts from other blogs (this will let users who have 'separate' blogs for their different languages combine their existing posts)
Option to have different templates for each blog language
Option to set different comment settings for each language, and different social share settings
Ability to import into a multi-language blog (it will probably be a few more months before work can begin on this one)
@Niel we're working on loosening up restrictions so you can have different templates, comment settings, Google AMP settings, and social share settings. We're also working on making it easier to combine existing blog posts together.
This is definitely still a work in progress, hence the "in beta" status It's my team's top priority and we'll be sending out updates as soon as possible! Thank you for your patience.
Blog subscriptions can be managed for each language of the blog
Still to come:
Multi-language Authors and Tags (in development)
Update to make the language switcher work on the blog listing page (in development)
Ability to group existing posts from other blogs (this will let users who have 'separate' blogs for their different languages combine their existing posts)
Ability to import into a multi-language blog (it will probably be a few more months before work can begin on this one)
@Niel we're taking a look at that error in your portal, thanks for bringing it to my attention. In future, please report issues like this one to the support team, as that will be the fastest way to get help 🙂
Blog subscriptions can be managed for each language of the blog
Still to come:
Multi-language Authors and Tags (in development)
Update to make the language switcher work on the blog listing page (in development)
Ability to group existing posts from other blogs (this will let users who have 'separate' blogs for their different languages combine their existing posts)
Ability to import into a multi-language blog (it will probably be a few more months before work can begin on this one)
Thank you to everyone who has shared feedback and suggestions. Please continue to share your thoughts with me, either here in the comments or directly: svalsdottir@hubspot.com
@dgil8 when you're brought to the Blog Settings, click on the Language option in order to add a new language for this blog. Then you'll be able to set the settings for that language and go back to create a multi-language variation for a blog post:
I'm excited to say that we now have an early, beta version of multi-language Blog!
This multi-language blog beta includes:
Grouping of blog posts in the user interface (like you see when creating multi-language pages)
hreflang tags in the source code of blog posts which are grouped (good for SEO)
Separate email subscriptions for each blog language
Different page titles, meta descriptions for each language, managed in Blog Settings
Not yet included, but currently in development, support for multi-language:
Authors
Tags
If you would like access to the beta version of multi-language blog, please message me here, or email me directly (svalsdottir@hubspot.com ) with your HubSpot portal ID number.
I'll post again when I have another update to share.
This is still in development and is my team's #1 priority. We're very close to having a public beta available, and I'll update this post as soon as that's live so you know how to opt into it. We're planning on making the beta version available to you all in about a month.
Thank you for your patience and support! We're looking forward to delivering this feature to you, and I'll post again as soon as I have an update.
This is in planning - thank you all for your patience!
Additional background and context for anyone interested:
Many have commented that it's weird for HubSpot's page tools to offer a multi-language option while the blog doesn't have that feature. I agree - it doesn't make sense 🙂 The tools look very similar - and the management interface is completely identical across all content tools. But in the back end, the code bases are separate (necessary, as a blog (RSS feed) is inherently different from pages in how it behaves), and there were some other tools (related to the fact that the blog tool uses a single template) that need to be made multi-language friendly before the blog can become multi-language. That's why HubSpot website and landing pages have had the multi-language feature for quite some time while the blog has not.
My team is eager to provide you with the best possible multi-language blog. We've spoken to many already about their multi-language needs, but we're always looking to hear from more customers. If you're willing to share your thoughts and experiences beyond the comments here (I've read them all!), please book a time to speak with me.
Translation of blog content is very important to my client's site as we will be expanding the number of languages over the coming months. I have two other clients that will need this feature soon as well.
We currently have a Hubspot blog - it had 6 languages in total.. We had to recreate the blog 6 times and of course the blog post translations are not linked to each other.
Hubspot should really focus on important things like these. I've at least one client who decided not to use Hubspot for exactly this reason and I can't blame them.
Like many of you, I've run into the issue of having a multi-national site and not being able to support it through Hubspot's blog platform. I was wondering if any of you could make any recommendations based on the workaround solutions I've thought of. Here's a little colour on our website structure:
We've currently got an American/worldwide version of our site www.outbackteambuilding.com and a Canadian version of it www.outbackteambuilding.com/ca/. Most pages that appear on outbackteambuilding.com will appear on the CA version as well. My web developer made it so that the pages would automatically insert the self-referencing canonical URL into the header as well as the hreflang tags for their respective countries.
Here are my workaround ideas:
Merge the blogs into one
set up redirects from all previous Canadian pages to go to the main site's blog
have my developer set up an automated or manual redirect for when a Canadian visitor clicks through on a blog link IE:
Canadian visitor is on blog page > visitor clicks through on a link to visit a product page > visitor is automatically redirected to outbackteambuilding.com/page/ca/ OR
Canadian visitor is on blog page > visitor clicks through on a link to visit a product page > a layover appears, recommending the visitor go to outbackteambuilding.com/page/ca/
Host two separate blogs
Add language tags to the global header of the blogs
Use self-referencing canonical tag function for each blog post on each site
Can anyone tell me which route they suggest, what the SEO impact would be, or what workaround they would recommend in my case?
@makototaguchi11 as far as I know, the best work around for now is just creating two blogs. So you have an English blog and an .... language blog. The only thing that doesn't work is the standard translation functionality (people can't translate a specific blog post; they have to go to your other-language-website. Success!
Correct - creating another blog is basically your only option.
Why Hubspot has foreseen landingpage-translations & no blog-post translations, will forever be a mystery.. one of their biggest mistakes if they'd know how many people decide not to use Hubspot because of this limition. (especially for bilingual countries as i live in)
Thank you. I tried to craete a new blog by copying everything from the old blog but seems like the format is broken.. Maybe the root url is changed so that's why. Does anyone have any idea?
Hi @makototaguchi11, it shouldn't be that hard. Just 'edit' an existing blog, then go to ''settings'', click on edit url, then you can change de url, but also select another blog. Then just check if the old url automatically re-directs, or that you have to add an url mapping yourself.