Using hreflang for international pages - is this how you do it?

[Caro-O]

My client is trying to achieve a global presence in select countries, and then track traffic from their international pages in Google Analytics.

The content for the international pages is pretty much the same as for USA pages, but the form and a few other details are different due to how product licensing has to be set up.

I don’t want to risk losing ranking for existing USA pages due to issues like duplicate content etc.

What is the best way to approach this? This is my first foray into this and I’ve been scanning the MOZ topics but a number of the conversations are going over my head,so suggestions will need to be pretty simple

Is it a case of adding hreflang code to each page and creating different URLs for tracking. For example:
URL for USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/
URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name /
URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name /
URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name /

[Caro-O]

Thanks Kate...I think this will be our best option for now...differentiate the content as much as we can. I'll refer back to this thread when we're ready to move forward with foreign language pages next year.

[katemorris]

Changing the duplicated content will take care of it by itself. It will have to be rewritten for each market though. It is up to you to decide if that is the best course of action for you. If you translate the content using regional dialects (have someone in that region write the page fresh), then hreflang is useful. That's when the en-us and en-ca, etc. come into play. Would something like that be possible?

[Caro-O]

Tom, thanks.

The company is small-med and is growing fast, with a presence in some other countries to handle business there as it grows. I think I understand how we have to handle the foreign languages. We may be able to go with ccTLDs as we introduce more languages instead of the subfolder we currently have for Germany only.

But the real issue that we're trying to zero in on is a small group of 'international' English pages designed for non-USA/Canda visitors that have some differences in how the free trial for the product is processed. We want to make it clear to Google that these are not duplicate content. We will be promoting them via advertising etc, but we still don't want them seen to be duplicated content.

Thanks,
Caro

[Caro-O]

Kate, although the pages are the same as the USA ones, there's no reason we cannot switch up the language a bit for countries outside the USA...alter the message a little. If we did, would we then be able to use hreflang to indicate to google that there's a different version of the pages for select other markets and prevent them from thinking it's duplicate content?

[BlueprintMarketing]

Kate keeps giving great advice.

If you have a multilingual, SEO, PPC & content team Further the budget for the infrastructure ( it's going to be very expensive either way, to be honest)

You will get more out of multiple domains ccTLD's

I would love to hear how big the company is that you're doing this for and exactly how many people will be working on this project?

If this expansion works well and your business decides to go after China and Russia you have a deal with two more search engines. Also if you go to Japan, you want to focus on Yahoo as well.

If you start using

• https://www.yandex.com/ Russia Ukraine

• &

• http://www.baidu.com/ China

• http://www.yahoo.co.jp/  Approximately 30 to 40% of Japan

• the good the bad and the scary about Google and Yahoo Japan

• https://www.clickz.com/who-does-it-better-yahoo-japan-or-google-japan/26403/

• You will have to deal with regulations as well as differences in the way the search engine handles traffic. IP addresses matter

Companies like Fastly & Akamai will offer a type of super pop that gives you a static IP although it's not inexpensive.

I imagine It's possible for you to end up in Asia from what it sounds like? if there is a return on the investment. Remember in Japan people like Yahoo quite a bit.

• https://www.ajpr.com/search-engine-market-share-in-asia-january-2016/
• http://searchengineland.com/library/baidu
• http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-25/china-tightens-internet-rules-for-baidu-and-other-search-engines

I hope this is of help did not mean to go off track but you are talking about quite a few languages.

Sincerely,

Tom

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[BlueprintMarketing]

corrected the Deutschland tag good catch.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Yes sorry about that. The code for Germany is DE–DE the code for the German language is DE

I am sorry about that I tried to make it as easy as possible to understand but even I was getting a little  tired towards the end.

excellent catch.

I would definitely customize the folders so that the languages in German Including URLs.

Kate makes an excellent point about a real choice that you have with going with subfolders or a unique domain.

There is an extraordinarily larger amount of work with multi-Geo domains however if you're starting from scratch and you think about it most of the URLs from the country are targeting will benefit your site in Whatever country or ( whatever content is on the site that linked to you)

Also if you're going to focus in the future hypothetically let's say Japan or China you will want to target different search engines other than Google these will be dependent highly on your IP address. There are ways to proxy it and make it work but infrastructure it's expensive and so does essentially doing SEO for a site per a language.

hreflang will allow you to keep the subtle differences in English for instance in the UK and elevator is a lift in Canada color is spelled differently small things do make a difference, and you should have those subtle things in your content.

I understand what you're saying about just using English and pushing it out there. You could generalize English and target no country whatsoever I would be interested to see how that worked out. Obviously, you have more than one copy Of English without hreflang you will have problems with duplicate content.

Kate brings up a very good question how big your team is? Who else will be assisting does everyone understand that search is impossible to do if you do not know the language as well as PPC. So you'll have to have native speakers I'm sure you do just want to bring up a couple of points.

What are you using for a CMS for have you made that choice yet? What are you going to do to host the site?

Hope this is helpful,

Tom

[Caro-O]

No, hardly at all.

There are two major phrases they all use, with modifiers at the end:
EG:
keyword
keyword solution
keyword software
keyword product
keyword download

etc

[katemorris]

Does anything about how people search for the product change in the 5 countries?

[Caro-O]

Kate,

What they have is:

1. a subfolder for the German content which has 6 pages that will be targeted to German speakers both inside and outside of Germany - which I'm assuming will need hreflang code specifying language but not country, right?

2. URLs for the English pages targeting English speakers outside the USA that are simply different page names. So:

USA page - www.company.com/product-A
Equivalent International page with different form - www.company.com/product-A-international (we've identified 5 countries we want to show up in, and then any other one by default)
And I'm assuming hreflang is not appropriate for the international page, but I'm not sure what one does  instead to avoid dupe content.

Does this help?

[katemorris]

That tool is meant for the business as a whole.

Are you willing to (or are they, the client/company) put the work into differentiating the content per country? Is that needed? If it is just the form that changes, you can just change the form depending on what country they input into the form. Would that work? Then there is only one site to maintain and all you have to deal with is translations (german, spanish, japanese, french, etc. The languages, not the countries).

All that said you have two choices:

1. One site, different translations (using hreflang in between) with some changes to what happens with the form.

2. Multiple country sites that are operated differently to target each region. These can be ccTLDs or on the same domain but need to be treated as separate sites. No need for hreflang, but major need for different content.

[Caro-O]

Kate, I've been on this all day and I think I need to rephrase my question. I've figured out that if the pages for the international audience are all English and have no real LANGUAGE variations, I don't need to use hreflang, correct?

The difference between the USA pages and the other English countries is that there is a slight variation in how the product licence is issued once they complete the free trial form. So the form processes differently from different pages.

So, with everyone seeing the same content (99% the same) on different URLs, what is the correct way to:
1. Indicate to Google the audience is in a different region
2. Prevent duplicate content issues.

[Caro-O]

Thomas when you say "This is the code you should add in a page's tag for the UK version of company.com would be:" are you referring to the code above or the code below? Because the code below refers to Germany. So I'm assuming you meant the code above that text, right?

To answer some of your questions:

The USA site is English only...no plans for Spanish yet.
The Canada site is English only...no plans for French yet.
For Germany customers we have some German pages in a Folder on our company.com domain

[Caro-O]

Kate should I use the tool twice...once for English speaking countries with no translation needs (UK, Australia etc), and once for foreign language pages (which will for now be in folders on our .com domain)?

I ran the tool for the scenario of delivering our English pages with international licensing info on them to English speaking countries outside the USA and it says:

• Don't use HREFLANG; you are not translating inside a country, so it's not necessary.
  Why no HREFLANG? Our german pages are translated for people in germany.
• Don't use IP detection for country targeting, but ask your customers to set a cookie.

How would I ensure Google doesn't see my intl. pages as duplicate content?

[Caro-O]

Thanks for all this info...looks like I have my work cut out for me this morning. Much appreciated.

[Caro-O]

Thank you! I'll check this out today!

[BlueprintMarketing]

You will want to listen to Kate. As simple as it may seem it's extremely complicated.

Your example is right below my example is below that

• "URL for the USA: https://company.com/en-US/products/product-name/ just use /US if not targeting Spanish in the United States
• URL for Canada: https://company.com/en-ca/products/product-name/ No French-Canadian?  just use/CA
• URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/products/product-name / in Germany I might not be able to read your URL I would speak just Deutsche
• URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/en/products/product-name/." the rest of the world should not need EN as they speak lots of languages. You want to showcase your language offerings to them.

My example is below this line my example is below but say were targeting the United Kingdom with your URLS

• URL for the USA: https://company.com/us/products/product-name/ hreflang=”en-US.”
• URL for Canada: https://company.com/ca/products/product-name/ hreflang=”en-CA”
• URL for Canada FR: https://company.com/ca-fr/produits/nom-du-produit/ hreflang=”fr-CA” />
• URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/produkte/produktname/ hreflang=”de” />
• URL for rest of the world: https://company.com/products/product-name/ hreflang=”x-default

This is the code you should add in a page's tag for the UK version of company.com would be:

• URL for German Language Content: https://company.com/de/produkte/produktname/ hreflang=”de”

• Note I used German in the URL instead of English because that is what my target audience will be reading.

• URL for the USA: https://company.com/us/products/product-name/  hreflang=”en-US.”

• URL for Canada: https://company.com/ca/products/product-name/ hreflang=”en-CA.”

• URL for Canada: https://company.com/ca-fr/produits/nom-du-produit / hreflang=”fr-CA” />

• company.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />

• https://company.com/products/product-name/

Note I used French Canadian in the URL instead of English because that is what my target audience will be reading. ( I do not know French-Canadian so I really just used French) French-Canadian was also modified there are different versions of English as well with Canada and the UK

https://company.com main UK version of the site, a German language German subdirectory, an English-language Canadian subdirectory, and a French Language Canadian subdirectory:

Also, you add to the Hreflang tag is the x default code:

This is an additional line, which tells Google that this version of the site is the one that should be displayed if no other version of the site is suitable. If this link happened added to the example at the top of the page, then if someone from Spain visited the site Google would direct them to https://company.com

All you have to do is list the alternative version of the pages and have the x default at the bottom. For example, this is what you would do for the English Canadian version:

• company.com/” hreflang=”en-GB” />
• company.com/de” hreflang=”de” />
• company.com/ca-fr” hreflang=”fr-CA” />
• company.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />

If you're using any languages that have  read right to left this will be an issue with encoding you can no longer get away without making sure, there's no  byte order mark in your code, and you must use UTF-8

• http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/
• http://searchengineland.com/auditing-hreflang-annotations-common-issues-avoid-219483
• https://www.branded3.com/blog/overcome-common-errors-implementing-hreflang-tag/
• https://www.deepcrawl.com/knowledge/best-practice/hreflang-101-how-to-avoid-international-duplication/
• https://www.branded3.com/blog/implementing-hreflang-tag/

Tools

• https://www.deepcrawl.com
• https://screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
• https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/07/troubleshooting-hreflang-annotations-in.html

Especially when you get into all the different languages and encoding correctly or different dialects being a German myself I am keenly aware of the differences and it would affect my search intent as well.

So if you're going, /de/ German make sure you’re Just looking to target those with the ability to speak and read German not a particular region like Germany itself, Austria, Switzerland, etc.

Not to say that/DE will not suffice but you will want to ensure you're targeting The language as well as the country or just the language depending on what your exact goal is.

I hope this helps,

Tom

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[katemorris]

Hey!

So international can be pretty confusing, so welcome to the world of international expansion. I'd suggest first checking out this tool I built to determine how to approach your situation. It seems like you have needs for translation (German language, not Germany focused) and geo-targeting (Canada focus, same language), and you will have reasons for people to access different content.

http://outspokenmedia.com/international-seo-strategy/

Let me know what result you get and we can go from there. If it is blended, I can give you some pointers from there. It won't be easy, it's not just about hreflang, but we'll get you set up right.

[Caro-O]

Thanks for these resources Thomas...I'll take a look at them shortly.

[ThomasHarvey]

Yes that looks correct, I would add an x-default for the rest of the world. this is a good article: https://hreflang.org/use-hreflang-canonical-together/

http://www.myseosolution.de/downloads/mobile-hreflang-canonical-fixed.png Is a great image to explain things.