Hreflang on non-canonical pages
-
Hi!
I've been trying to figure out what is the best way to solve this dilemma with duplicate content and multiple languages across domains.
1 product info page
2 same product but GREEN
3 same product but RED
4 same product but YELLOW**Question: **
Since pages 2,3,4 just varies slightly I use the canonical tag to indicate they are duplicates of page 1.
Now I also want to indicate there are other language versions with the_ rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _element.
Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on the canonical page only pointing to the canonical page with "x" language.
Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages pointing to the canonical page with the "x" language?
Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages and then point it to the translated page (even if it is not a canonical page) ?
/Lars
-
Wow, that's a tricky one. I haven't seen a lot of good data on rel="alternate" hreflang="x" yet, other than general suggestions that it's worth trying and seems to sometimes work. Technically, Google would say that the green/red/yellow versions aren't true duplicates, but practically, I think the canonical here is a good approach.
My gut feeling is that the canonical will overpower the hreflang - adding the alternate language versions to the color variants won't hurt you, but it probably won't do anything. If it were me, I think I'd go with your first approach - just add the hreflang tag to the canonical version and leave it off the variants. Monitor that - see how it impacts your international rankings, and go from there.
-
Have you had any joy with this yet?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page Speed or Size?
Hi everyone. I have a client who really wants to add a 1min html5 video to the background of their homepage. I have managed to reduce the size of the video to 20MB and I have tested the page in pingdom. The results are 1.85 s to load, and weighed in at 21.2 MB. My question is does Google factor page load speed or size in it's ranking factors? I am also mindful of the negative effect this could have on bounce rate. Thanks.
Technical SEO | | WillWatrous0 -
Issue with Cached pages
I have a client who has a three domains:
Technical SEO | | paulbaguley
budgetkits.co.uk
prosocceruk.co.uk
cheapfootballkits.co.uk Budget Kits is not active but Pro Soccer and Cheap Football Kits are. The issue is when you do site:budgetkits.co.uk on Google it brings back results. If you click on the link it goes to page saying website doesn't exist which is correct but if you click on cached it shows you a page from prosocceruk.co.uk or cheapfootballkits.co.uk. The cached pages are very recent by a couple of days ago to a week. The first result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/rainwear but the cached page is www.prosocceruk.co.uk/rainwear The third result brings up www.budgetkits.co.uk/kids-football-kits but the cached page is http://www.cheapfootballkits.co.uk The history of this issue is that budgetkits.co.uk was its own website 7 years ago and then it used to point at prosocceruk.co.uk after that but it no longer does for about two months. All files have been deleted from budgetkits.co.uk so it is just a domain. Any help with this would be very much appreciated as I have not seen this kind of issue before.0 -
Moving Some Content From Page A to Page B
Page A has written content, pictures, videos. The written content from Page A is being moved to Page B. When Google crawls the pages next time around will Page B receive the content credit? Will there not be any issues that this content originally belonged to Page A? Page A is not a page I want to rank for (just have great pictures and videos for users). Can I 301 redirect from Page A to B since the written content from A has been deleted or no need? Again, I intent to keep Page A live because good value for users to see pictures and videos.
Technical SEO | | khi50 -
Home page canonical issues
Hi, I've noticed I can access/view a client's site's home page using the following URL variations - http://example.com/
Technical SEO | | simon-145328
http://example/index.html
http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/index.html There's been no preference set in Google WMT but Google has indexed and features this URL - http://example.com/ However, just to complicate matters, the vast majority of external links point to the 'www' version. Obviously i would like to tidy this up and have asked the client's web development company if they can place 301 redirects on the domains we no longer want to work - I received this reply but I'm not sure whether this does take care of the duplicate issue - Understand what you're saying, but this shouldn't be an issue regarding SEO. Essentially all the domains listed are linking to the same index.html page hosted at 1 location My question is, do i need to place 301 redirects on the domains we don't want to work and do i stick with the 'non www' version Google has indexed and try to change the external links so they point to the 'non www' version or go with the 'www' version and set this as the preferred domain in Google WMT? My technical knowledge in this area is limited so any help would be most appreciated. Regards,
Simon.0 -
Can up a page
I do my best to optimize the on-page parameters for my page www.lkeria.com/AADL-logement-Algerie.php for the kw "aadl" but i can't understand what Ii'm doing wrong (i desapear 2 mounths ago). The page is optimize (title, description, h1, h2 etc.) few links with different ancers, but google put a spamy site www[dot]aadl[dot]biz in top 3 ratheer my page. Can you give me some advice to fix this issue? What I am doing wrong? Tanks in advance
Technical SEO | | lkeria0 -
I have a mobile version and a standard version of my website. I'd like to show users some pages on the non-mobile site but keep googlebot mobile out. Is that ok?
On the mobile version not all the content of the normal site is available to the users. Since we didn't want googlebot mobile to index the non-mobile site, all the non-existent pages were returned with a 404 error. But now we'd like to show the mobile users these pages and send them to the normal site. If we allow the users to see these pages, is it ok to block googlebot mobile so these non-mobile pages are not indexed by googlebot mobile or will that create some issues for google?
Technical SEO | | bgs0 -
Off-page SEO and on-page SEO improvements
I would like to know what off-page SEO and on-page SEO improvements can be made to one of our client websites http://www.nd-center.com Best regards,
Technical SEO | | fkdpl2420 -
Canonical efficiency
Hi, I'm creating recommendations for one of my client's site. It's a news site highly based on a regional aspect. One of the main features would be that you can navigate on a high level, we call it inter-regional (with all the regions news) and on the regional level (with only news related to the region) which act as a filter which means that most of my content will be duplicate. To allow the user to navigate the site on the two levels means that all the news pages will be duplicated, one with the inter-regional URL and one with the regional URL. Example: http://www.sitename.com/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article http://www.sitename.com/region-name/category/2011/11/07/name-of-the-article The regional URL is the official one, since it has all the keywords I want, and I'm planning to have a canonical on both version with the regional URL. Is there a risk that this would affect my ranking? Any alternatives? I read that I could prevent SE to crawl inter-regional articles using my robot.txt but I'm not fond of that. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Pherogab0