Polylang - creates duplicate pages or just does content substitution?

Question

Search Engine Optimization

There is a site in Russian on Wordpress. I also did a translation into English using the "Polylang" plugin. Now I want to remove the English version.
I just don’t know how to do it right: just disable the plugin or what?
Does it create duplicate pages or just replace the text in the desired language?
Also, search engines could index the page in English. If I disable the plugin, will clicking from the search result in an error page?

Answer 1

Yes, all multilingual plugins create separate pages in another language. If you just remove the plugin, users will be taken to a page with an error.
To remove the English version as smoothly as possible, there are two ways:
1.
- create a list of all pages for which translations have been written; -
manually set the rules for 301 redirects from English to Russian
versions -301/) - leave it like this for 2-3 months while search bots re-index the site and remove non-existent pages from the index, then disable the redirect plugin
The first option is more elegant and correct, but time-consuming. The second one takes 10 minutes, but is less effective, because if links were left to the English versions and they had some positions, the "weight" of the pages will spread throughout the site and the positions of the Russian versions may suffer