Fixing Canonical URL Issues in Multi-Language Bridgetown Sites

Bridgetown is an awesome Ruby-based framework for generating static websites, and its multi-language support is super intuitive.

However, when I checked Google Search Console, I noticed that half of my pages weren’t indexed. The issue? Google saw them as too similar—even when they were in different languages.

The Fix: Add hreflang Tags inside the head tag

<% resource.all_locales.each do |local_resource|  %>
  <% path, locale = local_resource.relative_url, local_resource.data.locale %>
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="<%= locale %>" href="<%= absolute_url path %>" />
<% end %>

The path in href needs to be absolute, relative paths like /pt/ may not count so check in your bridgetown.config.yml file if the url is set

This simple fix helped get my multilingual pages indexed properly. Hope it helps! 🚀