Multilanguage with canonicals and without duplicates

Question

Website has two language versions of the pages with different URLs. Wordpress plug-in translates pages after selecting the language in the site menu, not automatically.

1. Am I doing the right thing if I put the canonical tag in the section for each page?

http://www.example.com/page-english

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page-english" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ru" href="http://www.example.com/page-russian">

http://www.example.com/page-russian

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/page-russian" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/page-english">

2. How to do it correctly to avoid duplication in Google and showing the correct version of the page in the search result based on the language selection in the user's browser?

Answer 1

First of all, you are not going to generate duplicate content as there is only one URL in each language. You could generate duplicate content if you allow different access for the same content. For example:

http://www.example.com/page-english
http://www.example.com/page-english/

In your case, it's correct to use the canonical tag (if you want to prevent future duplicate problems) but there is a mistake with the hreflang implementation.

Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions.

So you have to include in both URLs the same code:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ru" href="http://www.example.com/page-russian">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/page-english">