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.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • 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
    3586
    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

                                  • Cleber009

                                    Problem to get multilingual posts indexed on Google

                                    Last year on June I decided to make my site multi-lingual. The domain is: https://www.dailyblogprofits.com/ The main language English and I added Portuguese and a few posts on Spanish. What happened since then? I started losing traffic from Google and posts on Portuguese are not being indexed. I use WPML plugin to make it multi-lingual and I had Yoast installed. This week I uninstalled Yoast and when I type on google "site:site:dailyblogprofits.com/pt-br" I started seeing Google indexing images, but still not the missing posts. I have around 145 posts on Portuguese, but on Search Console it show only 57 hreflang tags. Any idea what is the problem? I'm willing to pay for an SEO Expert to resolve this problem to me.

                                    International SEO | | Cleber009
                                    0
                                  • MMcCalden

                                    Setting up international site subdirectories in GSC as separate properties for better geotargeting?

                                    My client has an international website with a subdirectory structure for each country and language version - eg. /en-US. At present, there is a single property set up for the domain in Google Search Console but there are currently various geotargeting issues I’m trying to correct with hreflang tags. My question is, is it still recommended practise and helpful  to add each international subdirectory to Google Search Console as an individual property to help with correct language and region tagging? I know there used to be properly sets for this but haven’t found any up to date guidance on whether setting up all the different versions as their own properties might help with targeting. Many thanks in advance!

                                    International SEO | | MMcCalden
                                    0
                                  • MaxSydenham

                                    Redirect to 'default' or English (/en) version of site?

                                    Hi Moz Community! I'm trying to work through a thorny internationalization issue with the 'default' and English versions of our site. We have an international set-up of: www.domain.com (in english) www.domain.com/en www.domain.com/en-gb www.domain.com/fr-fr www.domain.com/de-de and so on... All the canonicals and HREFLANGs are set up, except the English language version is giving me pause. If you visit www.domain.com, all of the internal links on that page (due to the current way our cms works) point to www.domain.com/en/ versions of the pages. Content is identical between the two versions. The canonical on, say,  www.domain.com/en/products points to www.domain.com/products.  Feels like we're pulling in two different directions with our internationalization signals. Links go one way, canonical goes another. Three options I can see: Remove the /en/ version of the site. 301 all the /en versions of pages to /. Update the hreflangs to point the EN language users to the / version. **Redirect the / version of the site to /en. **The reverse of the above. **Keep both the /en and the / versions, update the links on / version. **Make it so that visitors to the / version of the site follow links that don't take them to the /en site. It feels like the /en version of the site is redundant and potentially sending confusing signals to search engines (it's currently a bit of a toss-up as to which version of a page ranks). I'm leaning toward removing the /en version and redirecting to the / version. It would be a big step as currently - due to the internal linking - about 40% of our traffic goes through the /en path. Anything to be aware of? Any recommendations or advice would be much appreciated.

                                    International SEO | | MaxSydenham
                                    0
                                  • matt-14567

                                    In the U.S., how can I stop the European version of my site from outranking the U.S. version?

                                    I've got a site with two versions – a U.S. version and a European version. Users are directed to the appropriate version through a landing page that asks where they're located; both sites are on the same domain, except one is .com/us and the other is .com/eu. My issue is that for some keywords, the European version is outranking the U.S. version in Google's U.S. SERPs. Not only that, but when Google displays sitelinks in the U.S. SERPs, it's a combination of pages on the European site and the U.S. site. Does anyone know how I can stop the European site from outranking the U.S. site in the U.S.? Or how I can get Google to only display sitelinks for pages on the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs? Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this topic!

                                    International SEO | | matt-14567
                                    0
                                  • lcourse

                                    How to interlink 16 different language versions of site?

                                    I remember that Matt Cutts recommended against interlinking many language versions of a site.
                                    Considering that google now also crawls javascript links, what is best way to implement interlinking? I still see otherwhise extremely well optimized large sites interlinking to more than 10 different language versions e.g. zalando.de, but also booking.com (even though here on same domain). Currently we have an expandable css dropdown in the footer interlinking 16 different language versions with different TLD. Would you be concerned? What would you suggest how to interlink domains (for user link would be useful)?

                                    International SEO | | lcourse
                                    0
                                  • Bush_JSM

                                    Blocking domestic Google's in Robots.txt

                                    Hey, I want to block Google.co.uk from crawling a site but want Google.de to crawl it. I know how to configure the Robots.txt to block Google and other engines - is there a fix to block certain domestic crawlers? any ideas? Thanks B

                                    International SEO | | Bush_JSM
                                    0
                                  • Corel

                                    Non US site pages indexed in US Google search

                                    Hi, We are having a global site wide issue with non US site pages being indexed by Google and served up in US search results.  Conversley, we have US en pages showing in the Japan Google search results. We currently us IP detect to direct users to the correct regional site but it isn't effective if the users are entering through an incorrect regional page.  At the top of each or our pages we have a drop down menu to allow users to manually select their preferred region.  Is it possible that Google Bot is crawling these links and indexing these other regional pages as US and not detecting it due to our URL structure? Below are examples of two of our URLs for reference - one from Canada, the other from the US /ca/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog50008/ /us/en/prod4130078/2500058/catalog20038/ If that is, in fact, what is happening, would setting the links within the drop down to 'no follow' address the problem? Thank you. Angie

                                    International SEO | | Corel
                                    0
                                  • BlinkWeb

                                    Targeting Different Countries... One Site or Separate?

                                    I have a client who has 3 ecommerce sites. They are somewhat differentiated but for the most part sell the same stuff. Luckily 2 of them are quite authoritative, old and rank reasonably well. Most of the visitors and sales come from the US. He wants to start targeting Europe, Mexico and Canada. What are your suggestions for doing this? Are we better targeting on the main domains? Not really sure how to do that? Should we use a subdomain and a new store front for each geo? Should we use a .co.uk .co.mx and .co.ca each with a unique storefront? It looks like we are moving to a Magento platform so setting up multiple storefronts on a single database is not a big issue. Anyone have any experience with this?

                                    International SEO | | BlinkWeb
                                    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.