A common way to ship translations before they are ready: close them with noindex and point their canonical at the original. It is a reasonable holding pattern and a dangerous resting place — the pages stay out of search in every market they were built for, and nothing on the site looks broken. On a live ten-language catalogue this one rule covered 1,408 pages in nine languages, two and a half months after it was introduced as temporary for two of them. Reported page by page it produced 9,722 findings across seven checks — nine tenths of the report — and the one thing worth knowing drowned in its own consequences. So it is reported once, with a count per language, and the question it actually raises: which of these translations are ready to open? The pages that are not ready should also stop declaring hreflang, because a cluster that calls them equal versions while their canonical calls them duplicates leaves the choice to the search engine.
The finding reads:
critical translations-parked … language versions are closed with noindex and a canonical to the original — parked, not publishedDecide per language. If a translation is ready, open it: its own canonical and index. If it is not, keep it closed, but remove hreflang from it and from the pages that point at it: right now the signals contradict each other and the search engine picks for itself.
This is a site-level finding: it belongs to the site, not to any one page, and is reported once however many pages are audited.
pipx install indexgap
cd your-project
indexgap init
indexgap checkThen indexgap brief turns
every finding on this page into a work order in indexgap-briefs/,
with the thresholds the result has to satisfy and the command to check it.