International Targeting for Australia Problem

[DigitalThirdCoast]

Hello Moz Community!

I'm reaching out since I recently launched a UK and Australia version of my website. Now, each page on the website has 4 versions:

1. www.example.com

2. www.example.com/au

3. www.example.com/uk

4. www.example.com/en <-- this is a by-product of the plugin we're using, CMS is WP

each page has the following 4 targeting tags on it:

I looked in Webmaster Tools and we're getting an error on what appears to be every Australia page. The error states, ""au"- unknown language code. URLs for your site that have an unknown language code 'au' and their alternate URLs." In Google's own example, they have the language for Australia set as en-au [https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en}

Has anyone run into this issue before? We had the alternate tag set to "au" at first, but edited the plugin so the alternate tag now says "en-au", but this still hasn't remedied the problem. Any insights into resolving this error are greatly appreciated!

[DigitalThirdCoast]

Thank you for the responses! It does appear that the number of errors for "au" is decreasing and the tool showed me that things are set up properly. I will update if I see the decreasing errors trend reverse.

[MattAntonino]

You should test your actual page out with Flang

http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

If it shows as working in there, it's just WMT being slow. If it's not right in there hopefully you can see why from the message.

[Gyorgy.B]

Hi there

How long has it been since your fixed the language targeting? WMT is pretty slow with report updates and it can take weeks for Google to update them.

Check the cache date of the AU pages. Has Google crawled and indexed these pages since the update? If not, try using the Fetch function in WMT.