Which pages to put hreflang on?

[Roverandom]

Hi,

we are running a site which is a directory consisting of numbers of phone spammers. It contains descriptions, comments and so on. We are currently present in 9 countries. The websites all have the same structure, but, of course, the spam numbers in each country are different ones. If I want to tell Google that our website is available is several locations/languages, do I only put my hreflang tag on the start page then?

Thanks 
Thomas

[JonoAlderson]

Yup, that makes sense to me.

It's a bit of a grey area and an unusual case, but I think that this approach makes more sense - otherwise you're actively trying to stop people who aren't in the 'correct' country for a phone number to find/access that page.

[Roverandom]

Hey Jono,

Thanks for coming back to me about this. I guess, we understood the concept of hreflang wrong. As I understand it now, a page in English on our US website cleverdialer.com would have to have a corresponding page with the same content but in German on our German site cleverdialer.de. This is not the case, as the spam numbers usually are active in one country.

If this is so, the hreflang on our phone number pages would not make sense as we have websites with the same general structure for different countries but the content differs.

[JonoAlderson]

Hey Thomas,

Did you have a chance to think about this?

[JonoAlderson]

Hmm. This is potentially a little complex.

It sounds like what you're describing _isn't _a case for hreflang / internationalisation.

If I understand correctly, you have one website, which has information about (things in) different regions, but your website isn't explicitly targeting users in different regions?

Where does language come into this?

What happens if I'm a user in Spain, who's Google'd a phone number from Germany? What does the current experience look like (what pages might they see, in what language), and what's the optimal experience look like?

[Roverandom]

Hi Igor,

Thanks for your reply.

I still would have one more question: The only pages which are really identical are the start pages, so there is no problem in placing a hreflang tag there. All the detail pages with phone numbers I have are different for every country. Would it make sense putting a hreflang on every detail page pointing to the start page or would it be better just not to put a hreflang on these pages?

[Igor.Go]

All "international" pages. Specify language and country for each page you want to be shown in different countries.