Multiple hreflang tags
-
I'm trying to advise on the multi country seo for a site in terms of markup. We've already decided on using sub folders rather than separate sites or subdomains due to an established link profile and good rankings in all countries. The question is in relation to the homepage. Obviously this is the page most likely to rank well in any country (the site is a .com). But can multiple hreflang tags be put on the page to say that the page targets many countries? Or would leaving the hreflang tag off allow it to just rank for all countries?
Also do Yahoo and Bing follow hreflang tags? I can't find any info on this anywhere!
Thanks very much in advance for any help!
-
Hi Gregory,
Did you get any further with your query above? I am considering implementing the same thing...
Thanks,
Dan
-
Does anyone have experience listing multiple countries for a page that serves a region? This would be used for sites that have regional content pages divided like North America, South America, EMEA (Europe / Middle East / Africa), APAC (Asia / Pacific). For example, can you tag the North America pages en-us and en-ca on the same page so that it targets English for US and Canada?
-
Hi there,
Hreflang annotations serve to inform Google to which language (and additionally if you want to geotarget, country) each of your URL versions are targeted.
You can use the hreflang default annotation, as described here, when you want to show a default URL for a language / country that you're not targeting, which sounds like the situation you describe.
On the other hand, Bing doesn't support hreflang, but you can use the content language meta tag instead that they do take into consideration:
Thanks,
Aleyda
-
You can definitely have multiple hreflangs. This is the way to set it up:
The exact syntax to use in the header of the original would look something like this, for a site that has an original in English and alternate versions in Spanish (targeted to the audience in Mexico) and German:
(see: http://returnonnow.com/2012/06/international-seo-hreflang-tag/)
You should also deal with hreflang and alt languages in your sitemap, per: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865
I'm also fairly sure that Bing does not support hreflang. Only Google & Yandex do, I believe. I assume that will change as more international sites get their properties setup for Google and other engines want to stay relevant on international search.
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
-
Moving from single domain to multiple CCTLDs
Hi, I have a website targeting 3 markets (and therefor 3 languages). I was currently using a single domain with each market being targeted in the following format: www.website.com/pl
International SEO | | cellydy
www.website.com/de
www.website.com/hu It's clear to me by looking at organic results, that in my industry (Real Estate) Google is putting a large emphasis on local businesses and local domains. Top 10 organic results for all my keywords in all markets have country specific CCTLDs. I decided to migrate from a single domain strategy to a multi domain strategy. I own the domains. The new structure is www.website.com/pl -> www.website.pl
www.website.com/de -> www.website.de
www.website.com/hu -> www.website.hu All the website have been added to google search console and 301 redirects are in place and working correctly. The pages are all interlinked and have rel=alternate to each other. The sitemaps are all done correctly. My question is how do I tell Google about this. The change of address feature only works for changing one domain to one other domain. It's been a week and the old www.website.com domain is still showing up (even considering 301 redirects). Or do I just need to be patient and wait it out? Any tips?0 -
Hreflang alternate as single-hop 301 - is this actually a problem?
First, this is not a question about whether 301 redirects pass page rank. My question is that if your hreflang alternative page URL is a 301 redirect*, are there any downsides. In all cases with our situation, the 301 redirect is single-hop and working. Tools, such as SEMRush seem to flag this as a non-canonical hreflang error, but I'm not able to find any cases where Google has suggested a redirecting hreflang is a problem. I'd appreciate any information on this issue before we invest extra time on a large international site. *In Drupal, there are scenarios where it's all but impossible to avoid having a 301 redirect in your hreflang alternate URL without significant custom work.
International SEO | | scottclark0 -
Multiple Domains Appearing in SERP - 1 .com, 1 ccTLD
Our global domain and our US ccTLD domain both appear for brand searches in the US. How do I recommend to our Tech team to fix this, as it skews our Organic traffic numbers between the two domains? The brand is Sportradar. (Sportradar.com / Sportradar.us )
International SEO | | mitchell-moz0 -
Will hreflang with a language and region allow Google to show the page to all users of that language regardless of region?
I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?
International SEO | | Brando160 -
Is this setup of Hreflang xml sitemap correct?
Hi, I'm trying to setup hreflang for 2 domains. One is purely a US site and the other domain has the language-country as subdomains. For example: http://www.websiteUSA.com (Targets English - USA) https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA (Targets English - Canada) https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA (Targets French - Canada) https://www.websiteINT/es (Targets Spanish) ..and so on and so forth for about 12 of these international URLs. I created an XML sitemap that looks something like this: <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><url><loc>http://www.websiteUSA.com</loc></url></urlset> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA</loc></url> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA</loc></url> Question 1: Is this correct? In my actual file, I have all the countries listed and self-referencing. Question 2: I'm hosting this file at https://www.websiteINT.com/hreflang.xml AND at http://www.websiteUSA.com/hreflang.xml. Is this correct? Question 3: Will this help the SERPs direct english speakers from the US to http://www.websiteUSA.com while show SERPs for say English Speakers in Canada to https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA? Question 4: For some reason, when I put up the xml site, it only listed each URL once instead of the full XML file. Should I have uploaded a text file instead? It doesn't seem to render correctly. Thank you!
International SEO | | SylviaH0 -
Hreflang tag on every page?
Hello Moz Community, I'm working with a client who has translated their top 50 landing pages into Spanish. It's a large website and we don't have the resources to properly translate all pages at once, so we started with the top 50. We've already translated the content, title tags, URLs, etc. and the content will live in it's own /es-us/ directory. The client's website is set up in a way that all content follows a URL structure such as: https://www.example.com/en-us/. For Page A, it will live in English at: https://www.example.com/en-us/page-a For Page A, it will live in Spanish at https://www.example.com/es-us/page-a ("page-a" may vary since that part of the URL is translated) From my research in the Moz forums and Webmaster Support Console, I've written the following hreflang tags: /> For Page B, it will follow the same structure as Page A, and I wrote the corresponding hreflang tags the same way. My question is, do both of these tags need to be on both the Spanish and English version of the page? Or, would I put the "en-us" hreflang tag on the Spanish page and the "es-us" hreflang tag on the English page? I'm thinking that both hreflang tags should be on both the Spanish and English pages, but would love some clarification/confirmation from someone that has implemented this successfully before.
International SEO | | DigitalThirdCoast0 -
International websites : hreflang
Hi, i'm looking for good examples with 'href lang' tag (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") Have you examples of websites with this tag? Thanks D.
International SEO | | android_lyon0 -
"Hreflang=x" tag and multinational websites
Hello, We have multiple websites targeted at multiple countries and languages, each with the correct country extension. We have a corporate blog for each of these websites, where the blogs are subdomains of the main website. Currently we have a process of rewriting our blog posts completely – while keeping the same subjects – in order to have original content on each of our blogs, although we have up to 3 blogs in the same language. These are the languages we target: French – FRANCE French – SWITZERLAND French – BELGIUM Italian – ITALY Italian – SWITZERLAND German – GERMANY German – SWITZERLAND German – AUSTRIA Spanish – SPAIN Spanish – COLOMBIA Spanish – PANAMA Czech – CZECH REPUBLIC Swedish – SWEDEN Dutch – BELGIUM / NETHERLANDS English – UK English – INTERNATIONAL The process is obviously very tedious, and not always applied rigorously – i.e. some of the texts are posted on 2-3 different blogs, creating duplicate content.
International SEO | | ESL_Education
The questions : Would there be any reason for us to privilege the use the rel="canonical" tag over the "hreflang=x" tag, thus giving privilege to a "master" version for each language? Are there any risks in using the "hreflang="x" tag for our blogs considering that the posts would be very similar, except for references to additional content? Could there be any risk that Google would consider our sites as duplicate content after all? Should we specify on each blog that we have all the above versions, or should we only specify the other markets versions in each language? For example, should we specify on our French, Swiss and Belgium blog that we have 3 different French versions, on our UK blog that we also have an international version, and so on, or should we list all versions on each of the blogs? Does the "hreflang="x" tag facilitate the indexation of each of the versions in the SERPs of their targeted market? Lastly, are there any precautions we should take in order to put this in place? Looking forward to your feedback. Best wishes, Maëlle0