Href lang tag - do I need it?
-
Hey Guys!
I have a multi-lingual site in Switzerland serving french and german content.
URL structure looks like this:
homepage (main) http://www.exmaple.ch/
German http://www.exmaple.ch/de/
French http://www.exmaple.ch/fr/
You can choose a drop down on every page to convert the page into french or german. So there are basically two seperate sites, URL's do not cross over i.e. I have no french pages linking to german pages, it is all pretty good. The default language is german.
I have checked in Google.ch/ in both languages french and german for which pages are being served up and they seem all relevant, i.e. on french browser settings when I go to google.ch I see french pages being served and vice versa.
My question....Do I need href lang tags?
Cheers all!
-
Hi Gianluca,
Is that only if your site utilizes sub-domains or would it be the same if you utilize a sub-folder structure?
-
Kayleigh,
I would love to. I have 2 languages that are spoken in numerous countries around the world, on the same domain so I will definitely let you know what I am able to find out.
I will also take @Gianluca's advise and implement on the home page for the brand.
-
Hi!
I don't have any posts on it, it's just from my experience working on international SEO, as Gianluca says.
-
Hi,
I don't have a specific document to show you, but that statement is consequence of mine and many others international SEO experience.
Moreover, Google quit every mention of the contemporary use of the hreflang and the canonical tag from the helps pages about hreflang.
-
Thanks Guys, that's helpful!
@Brooke when you have implemented the tags across the sites can you share if anything has noticeably changed? Would be interesting to know.
@Ariel why would Google present non-matching sitelinks? I don't understand why it would do that? There are posts on it that I could read?
@Gianluca regarding your recommendation '...use the hreflang only on URLs that are canonical and not in canonicalized one. Contemporary usage of hreflang and rel="canonical" is not recommended.' Do you have a publication about this that I could read so I can understand the principal of it a little better? Would really help me understand how Google 'thinks'.
Thanks all for your input! Much appreciated.
-
Hi Keyleigh,
in a case like your, when you are targeting audiences using different languages, to use the hreflang is not an obligation, because you are giving Google enough language targeting signals already.
However, as Ariel wrote in his answer, I suggest to use at least for the home page and for those pages that usually are shown in the SERPs for brand name queries (the home page, for instance, but it could be also the about us page).
In fact, apart the potential sitelink issue, for the brand name search, Google could decide to show the "home page" with the highest authority, and not necessarily the one in the language corresponding to the users.
Said that, Google suggests using the hreflang practically always, hence - if it is not a complication - I would implement it.
One recommendation, though, use the hreflang only on URLs that are canonical and not in canonicalized one. Contemporary usage of hreflang and rel="canonical" is not recommended.
-
Thanks Brooke for sharing my post here on Moz.
90% of what I wrote is still valid, but the hreflang part, because in that moment Google was suggesting to use cross-domain canonical in case two or more pages were serving the same content in the same language in combination with the hreflang annotation, and to do so in order to avoid duplicated content issues.
After 3 years that suggestion is not valid anymore, mostly because of Google itself, which recognized it said a very stupid thing.
So, right now, if you have two or more websites serving the same content in the same language, but targeting users in different countries (eg.: domain.com for USA, domain.co.uk for UK and domain.ie for Ireland), then you should only use the hreflang annotations, because they are enough for alerting Google to not consider those pages as traditional duplicated content.
(note to myself: I need to ask to update that post)
-
Hi!
I managed several sites that were multilingual and aimed at people from different countries. At first, I didn't put hreflang and people used to see the correct website according to their language and country.
BUT (there's always a but), for example, when people googled the brand name + something, the websites appeared in SERPs with sitelinks, and the sitelinks didn't match the correct language/location.
So, if it isn't much trouble, I would suggest putting hreflang tags, to be sure (kind of) that you won't get into problems like the one I had.
Best wishes Ariel
-
Howdy,
I have not implemented the href tags and I am having similar results, however I have started to see that change a little in traffic so I am going to start the implementation of the tags across the sites.
My situation might be a little different though because I have 30 sites in different countries but there is this article from Gianluca that I have found extremely helpful: https://moz.com/blog/international-seo-dropping-the-information-dust
It is an older post but I still find it very helpful as to the best practices and things to consider when running international websites.
Hope this helps. - Brooke
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
-
Traffic drop after hreflang tags added
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers. thespacecollective.com (EU customers) thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers) We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice); EU site (thespacecollective.com) US site (thespacecollective.com/us/) Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good. This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
International SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Got hit by Spammy Structured Markup Penalty. Need Help
I have fixed the issue found in strctured data testing tool. Even I removed entire schema. Till now I have submitted reconsideration request 5 times and it rejected every time. Don't know how to lift this penalty. Any advise?? Need help guys my websites are going through very critical situations in terms of traffic from getting this manual action from Google. This is related to Pharma Industry.
International SEO | | rashmibhardwaj860 -
How should I handle hreflang tags if it's the same language in all targeting countries?
My company is creating an international version of our site at international.example.com. We are located in the US with our main site at www.example.com targeting US & Canada but offering slightly different products elsewhere internationally. Ideally, we would have hreflang tags for different versions in different languages, however, it's going to be an almost duplicate site besides a few different SKUs. All language and content on the site is going to be in English. Again, the only content changing is slightly different SKUs, they are almost identical sites. The subdomain is our only option right now. Should we implement hreflang tags even if both languages are English and only some of the content is different? Or will having just canonicals be fine? How should we handle this? Would it make sense to use hreflang this way and include it on both versions? I believe this would be signaling for US & Canda visitors to visit our main site and all other users go to the international site. Am I thinking this correctly or should we be doing this a different way?
International SEO | | tcope250 -
Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
International SEO | | lcourse
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?0 -
Are my hreflang and canonical link tags set correctly?
Currently we have a website in english but over time we will roll out parts of the whole site in different languages for different countries which will also result in country specific English versions of the website. The goal is that Google shows the country specific version of a page in a native language or English if available or falls back to the default English version of the same page otherwise. I listed below how we plan to use hreflang and canonical link tags to achieve this and was hoping to get some feedback from the Moz community if this will work as expected. (1) A page (www.mysite.com/page1) exists only in English as default. Users should be able to find it in every country unless there is an English version specifically for this country. We would use the following tags: (2) A page exists in English (www.mysite.com/id/en/page2) and Bahasa (www.mysite.com/id/id/page2) for a specific country (Indonesia in this case). Users in Indonesia searching in English should find the country specific English page. Indonesians searching in Bahasa should find the Bahasa version of that page. We would use the following tags on the English version: and therefor the following tags on the Bahasa version: In this case there wouldn't be a default English version available for the page. (3) If a page exists in English global, English for Indonesians and Bahasa for Indonesians we would use: on www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 on www.mysite.com/id/id/page3 on www.mysite.com/page3 If www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 and www.mysite.com/page3 are very similar we would risk google picking the page they want to rank for an english keyword searched in Indonesia, correct? (4) If a page in (1) and (2) can be reached with a different URL, we would only use a canonical and don't specify any hreflang tags e.g.: www.mysite.com/en/other-url-to-page1 or
International SEO | | ddspg
www.mysite.com/id/en/other-url-to-page2-english-indonesia (5) If a page that exists as global English page becomes available in English for a specific country as e.g. www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 we would use the following tags: and also add one more hreflang to www.mysite.com/page1: The assumption here is that Google would rank the localized page instead of the global page after crawling our site again. But since this will be a new page, are we going to lose traffic because www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 won't rank as well in the beginning (e.g. no offsite optimization)?0 -
Can multiple hreflang tags point to one URL? International SEO question
Moz, Hi Moz, Can multiple hreflang tags point to a single URL? For example, if I have a Canadian site (www.example.com/ca) that targets French and English speakers can I have the following: or would I use: Any insight would be very helpful and greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!
International SEO | | DA20131 -
Need advice - International SEO strategy
Hello Moz ! I've been working for some months on a very interesting SEO project. I even opened some discussions on it (Multi Regional website - Folder strategy, Multi Company websites) with amazing feedbacks from the community. INITIAL PROJECT Set up an international website with different subsidiaries name, 1 person to manage the whole web, different locations / regions / languages and same products. INITIAL IDEAS For the beginning of the project we opened a main website in .com with subfolders for the other subsidiaries .com/es ... However our business is mainly in English so we decided to focus harder (closing the .com/uk, using a unic com/blog, opening more pages etc.) on the main domain in .com CURRENT ISSUE How to rank locally our services with: Main domain in .com Last Google updates against link building Most of customers searching in English in different countries Company working in more than 80 countries, through 13 subsidiaries **IDEA ** I was thinking about using our blog to focus 3 months on a thematic around one service (blog post with link to the services article on our website, guest blogging with link to a blog post, discussions on Linkedin around the thematics, etc.) QUESTION What could be the best strategy to rank locally our products in this case ? Hope you can share your best advise. I guess I'm not the unique one to face this issue. So it'll be good to make a good strategy for all our community 🙂 Tks a lot ! Florian
International SEO | | AymanH0 -
Russian SEO Specialist Needed
Hi All, Looking for a bit of help here. We are quoting for a big SEO project on a Russian website and need high quality Russian link builders to work on building the links to the website. As well as this, we need to have a little look at the on-page content (but that will be more of just straight translation stuff, nothing big). If you're a Russian link builder and could help me here then get in touch. I only want ethical, white-hat and relevant links being built to the website so if that's not what you do, please don't waste my time 🙂 Also, this should really go without saying but I'll mention it anyway... you MUST speak Russian! Look forward to hearing from you. Matt matt@wowinternet.net
International SEO | | MatthewBarby0