Update from Shopify: 301 redirects are used
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Does anyone know whether 301 redirects are set for the URL translations?
After 3 days of chatting and email exchanges, I still haven’t received a clear answer from the support team, and the classic goofing off from support staff is now just annoying.
In response to the question “Is a 301 redirect set for the URL handle translations?”, there are now almost 10 messages from different support employees in my ticket.
One employee even said that 304 redirects are set, another that the pages of the translated URL handles cannot be indexed correctly by Google due to the market orientation in Shopify, as the Translate&Adapt app has errors.
Tools for checking the redirects also produce different results, including error messages.
If this is true, perhaps Shopify should tell all customers before everyone generates non-indexable pages!
Okay, just for everyone’s information:
I have just received the official information from Shopify that the translated URLs are not indexed because only a 302 redirect is used when translating URL handles.
So there is no SEO benefit from translating URL handles, but there is a risk of duplicated content, as it seems…
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Hi @Stefan_Fastenau , this is not correct. URL translations create a 301 redirect. I will investigate the support you received.
Hello Richbrown,
It’s very relieving to hear that.
Can you tell me how later changes to the translations are handled?
Are 301s also generated directly from the previous translations?
I had also created a separate post for this point.
No problem. When you add a translated URL handle, a 301 redirect gets created and is indexable by search engines. If you were to delete the translation, it will revert to how things were before the translation was added. It does not create an additional redirect from the deleted URL translation to default URL. There is caching at play, so you may see for a few seconds after deleting a URL translation that it doesn’t perform as expected, but refresh a couple of times or look in a private browser window and you should see it work. You can re-use a deleted translation if you want to. Let me know if that doesn’t answer your questions.
Ah okay,
so if a translated URL is indexed after a while, but then a correction or change to the translated URL occurs, then the pagerank from indexing can only be saved with a manually set redirect in Online shop/Navigation/Display URL redirects?
These would then also all be 301s?
Yep! Those manual redirects would be perfectly fine. But to confirm, we don’t make them for you if you change an already translated URL. You’d need to be mindful of accurately redirecting to the correct language / market subfolder
Okay, perfect, now I should have all the information.
Thank you very much 
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