Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Let your business shine with Listings AI
      Moz Local

      Let your business shine with Listings AI

      Learn more
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. International SEO
    4. Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?

    International SEO
    3
    15
    3559
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • lcourse
      lcourse last edited by

      Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
      We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine.

      When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code).

      Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page.

      I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
      rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" />

      canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page.

      Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • lcourse
        lcourse @Christy-Correll last edited by

        Hi Christy, not yet.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • Christy-Correll
          Christy-Correll Staff last edited by

          Hi there, have you been able to figure out this riddle yet -- or are you still working on it? We'd love an update!

          Christy 🙂

          lcourse 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • lcourse
            lcourse @VERBInteractive last edited by

            Thanks. Will post an update once we figured out this riddle.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • VERBInteractive
              VERBInteractive last edited by

              Worth a try, specifically since nothing else seems to be working at this point.

              Sorry I couldn't be more help. Please let us know what the solution is when ever you figure it out.

              lcourse 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • lcourse
                lcourse @VERBInteractive last edited by

                No.

                But in theroy it should not make a difference.
                hreflang can be either implemented in sitemap or in page.

                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • VERBInteractive
                  VERBInteractive last edited by

                  Do your sitemaps indicate the varying languages. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

                  https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en

                  lcourse 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • lcourse
                    lcourse @VERBInteractive last edited by

                    Thanks for checking. Yes, rich snippets are frequently not showing currently, however this is a different issue and it may be temporary.

                    My primary concern is rather that google does not index our sitemap for this domain according to search console and related that they show the .com page as cached version of the .uk page.

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • VERBInteractive
                      VERBInteractive last edited by

                      Very odd, when we do a search for "Adorini Firenze - Deluxe" in google UK with a VPN on for the UK it doesn't get any of the price schema markup. Maybe google is having a hard time deciding what to do with the schema so for normal results it doesn't pull any of the schema. What KW are ranking for this page? do you get similar results as us?

                      https://www.google.co.uk/search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&ie=UTF-8&q=Adorini Firenze - Deluxe&oq=Adorini Firenze - Deluxe&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l3j69i60l2.943j0j7&rct=j

                      lcourse 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                      • lcourse
                        lcourse @VERBInteractive last edited by

                        Happens already for many months.

                        Good idea to test with VPN. I just gave it a try with a UK proxy  and same result.

                        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                        • VERBInteractive
                          VERBInteractive last edited by

                          odd, looks to pull the cached schema, the issue might correct itself with time.

                          It's a bit of a long shot, but have you tried the lang/country codes completely in lower case? I doubt that will fix it but the tool in this Moz article I found (https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool) generates them in all lower case.

                          Also out of curiosity are you doing your test searches through a VPN?

                          https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool

                          lcourse 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                          • lcourse
                            lcourse @VERBInteractive last edited by

                            Sure, click on cached version of the first result in the following google search. Also you see here the rich snippets in USD instead of GBP:

                            https://www.google.es/search?q=site%3Ahumidordiscount.co.uk&oq=site%3Ahumidordiscount.co.uk&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.6216j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#q=site:humidordiscount.co.uk+firenze

                            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                            • VERBInteractive
                              VERBInteractive last edited by

                              Well at least we checked off one thing that it is not. 🙂

                              Can you provide a link to the SERP where you are seeing the issue?

                              lcourse 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                              • lcourse
                                lcourse last edited by

                                everything looks fine  in google search console.

                                no hreflang errors, no sitemap errors and google crawls every day basically all our pages for many months already.

                                1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                                • VERBInteractive
                                  VERBInteractive last edited by

                                  Odd, are you seeing any errors in Google Search Console (use to be Google webmaster tools) under Search Traffic/International Targeting. It will show any hreflang errors, I would start there and fix any errors.

                                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                                  • 1 / 1
                                  • First post
                                    Last post

                                  Got a burning SEO question?

                                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                                  Start my free trial


                                  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.

                                  • See all categories

                                  Related Questions

                                  • ThomasHarvey

                                    International Site Merge

                                    Hello, I've never had to deal with an international site before, let alone a site merge. These are two large sites, we've got a few smaller old sites that are currently redirecting to the main site (UK). We are looking at moving all the sites to the .com domain. We are also currently not using SSL (on the main pages, we are on the checkout). We also have a m.domain.com site. Are there any good guides on what needs to be done? My current strategy would be: Convert site to SSL. Mobile site and desktop site must be on the same domain. Start link building to the .com domain now (weaker link profile currently) What's the best way of handling the domains and languages? We're currently using a .tv site for the UK and .com for the US. I was thinking, and please correct me if i'm wrong, that we move the US site from domain.com to domain.com/us/ and the domain.tv to domain.com/en/ Would I then reference these by the following: What would we then do with the canonicals? Would they just reference their "local" version? Any advice or articles to read would really be appreciated.

                                    International SEO | | ThomasHarvey
                                    0
                                  • jobhuntinghq

                                    Issues with Baidu indexing

                                    I have a few issues with one of my sites being indexed in Baidu and not too sure of how to resolve them; 1. Two subdomains were redirected to the root domain, but both (www. and another) subdomains are still indexed after ~4 months. 2. A development subdomain is indexed, despite no longer working (it was taken down a few months back). 3. There's conflicting information on what the best approach is to get HTTPS pages indexed in Baidu and we can't find a good solution. 4. There are hundreds of variations of the home page (and a few other pages) on the main site, where Baidu has indexed lots of parameters. There doesn't appear to be anywhere in their webmaster tools to stop that happening, unlike with Google. I'm not the one who deals directly with this site, but I believe that Baidu's equivalent of Webmaster Tools has been used where possible to correctly index the site. Has anyone else had similar issues and, if so, were you able to resolve them? Thanks

                                    International SEO | | jobhuntinghq
                                    0
                                  • Dan-Lawrence

                                    What's the difference between 'en-gb' and 'en-uk; when choosing Search engines in campaign set up?

                                    Hi What's the difference search engine wise and which one should I choose, i presume GB since covers entire British landmass whereas UK excludes Ireland according to political definition, is it the same according to Google (& other engines) ? All Best Dan

                                    International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
                                    0
                                  • realpatients

                                    Best practice for Spanish version of English website?

                                    I'm doing an audit for a site that has all of its English pages under the same roof with Spanish pages in Wordpress. It is intended for Chicago, not Mexico. I suspect this is not a good thing, but I only have instinct to rely on here. What is the best practice for having the same website in two languages? http://www.enhancedform.com/ and http://www.enhancedform.com/spanish/

                                    International SEO | | realpatients
                                    0
                                  • peteboyd

                                    What is the proper way to setup hreflang tags on my English and Spanish site?

                                    I have a full English website at http://www.example.com and I have a Spanish version of the website at http://spanish.example.com but only about half of the English pages were translated and exist on the Spanish site. Should I just add a sitemap to both sites with hreflang tags that point to the correct version of the page? Is this a proper way to set this up? I was going to repeat this same process for all of the applicable URLs that exist on both versions of the website (English and Spanish). Is it okay to have hreflang="es" or do I need to have a country code attached as well? There are many Spanish speaking countries and I don't know if I need to list them all out. For example hreflang="es-bo" (Bolivia), hreflang="es-cl" (Chile), hreflang="es-co" (Columbia), etc... Sitemap example for English website URL:
                                    <url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc></url> Sitemap example for Spanish website URL:
                                    <url><loc>http://spanish.example.com/</loc></url> Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!

                                    International SEO | | peteboyd
                                    0
                                  • Indiatravelz

                                    Geographic Target set up in Google webmaster tool

                                    Hi, When i launched my web site 3 months ago ( I'm am very new to SEO)  I have set up the geographical target section in Google webmaster tool  for US. Now, I'm thinking to change it to some other geo target to see if i can get more traffic. However, recently few of my prompted keywords got really well in Google US ranking. Here are my Questions: if i will change the geo settings in webmaster tool will effect the ranking i already managed to achieve in US? In the list of all the countries in Google webmaster tools what does is mean "unlisted"? Can i select more than one country to target and if I can how? Thanks!! Raviv

                                    International SEO | | Indiatravelz
                                    0
                                  • PixelKicks

                                    Poor Google.co.uk ranking for a UK based .net, but great Google.com

                                    I run an extremely popular news & community website at http://www.onedirection.net, but we're having a few ranking issues in Google.co.uk. The site gets most of its traffic from the USA which isnt a bad thing - but for our key term "one direction", we currently don't rank at all on Google.co.uk. The site is located on a server based in Manchester, UK, and we used to rank very well earlier this year - fluttering about in position 5-7 most of the time. However earlier this year, around July, we started to fall down to page 2 or 3, and at the start of this month we don't rank at all for "one direction" on Google.co.uk. On Google.com however we're very strong, always on page one. We're definitely indexed on .co.uk, just not for main search term - which I find a bit frustrating. All the content on our site is unique, and we write 2-4 stories every day. We have an active forum too, so a lot of our content is user-generated. We've never had any "unnatural link building" messages in Webmaster Tools, and our link profile looks fine to me. Do we just need more .co.uk links, or are we being penalised for something? (I can't imagine what though). It certainly seems that way though. Another site, "www.onedirection.co.uk" which is never updated and has a blatant ad for something completely unrelated on its homepage, ranks above us at the moment-  which I find quite frankly appalling as our site is pretty much regarded as the worlds most popular One Direction news and fan site. We've spent the last few months improving the page-load times of our site, and we've reduced any unneccesary internal linking on the site. Approx 2 months ago we launched a new forum on the site, 301'ing all the old forum links to the new one, so that could have had an impact on rankings - but we'd expect to see an impact on Google.com as well if this was an issue. We definitely feel that we should be ranking higher on Google.co.uk. Does anyone have any ideas what the iproblems could be? Cheers, Chris.

                                    International SEO | | PixelKicks
                                    0
                                  • H-FARM

                                    IP Redirection vs. cloaking: no clear directives from Google

                                    Hi there, Here is our situation:we need to force an IP Redirection for our US users to www.domain.com and at the same time we have different country-specific subfolders with thei own language such as www.domain.com/fr. Our fear is that by forcing an IP redirection for US IP, we will prevent googlebot (which has an US IP) from crawling our country-specific subfolders. I didn't find any clear directives from Google representatives on that matter. In this video  Matt Cutts says it's always better to show Googlebot the same content as your users http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFf1gwr6HJw&noredirect=1, but on the other hand in that other video he says "Google basically crawls from one IP address range worldwide because (they) have one index worldwide. (They) don't build different indices, one for each country". This seems a contradiction to me... Thank you for your help !! Matteo

                                    International SEO | | H-FARM
                                    0

                                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                                  Start my free trial
                                  Products
                                  • Moz Pro
                                  • Moz Local
                                  • Moz API
                                  • Moz Data
                                  • STAT
                                  • Product Updates
                                  Moz Solutions
                                  • SMB Solutions
                                  • Agency Solutions
                                  • Enterprise Solutions
                                  • Digital Marketers
                                  Free SEO Tools
                                  • Domain Authority Checker
                                  • Link Explorer
                                  • Keyword Explorer
                                  • Competitive Research
                                  • Brand Authority Checker
                                  • Local Citation Checker
                                  • MozBar Extension
                                  • MozCast
                                  Resources
                                  • Blog
                                  • SEO Learning Center
                                  • Help Hub
                                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                                  • How-to Guides
                                  • Moz Academy
                                  • API Docs
                                  About Moz
                                  • About
                                  • Team
                                  • Careers
                                  • Contact
                                  Why Moz
                                  • Case Studies
                                  • Testimonials
                                  Get Involved
                                  • Become an Affiliate
                                  • MozCon
                                  • Webinars
                                  • Practical Marketer Series
                                  • MozPod
                                  Connect with us

                                  Contact the Help team

                                  Join our newsletter
                                  Moz logo
                                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                                  • Accessibility
                                  • Terms of Use
                                  • Privacy

                                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.