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. Hreflang tags and canonical tags - might be causing indexing and duplicate content issues

    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.

    Hreflang tags and canonical tags - might be causing indexing and duplicate content issues

    International SEO
    3
    9
    5584
    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.
    • Avid_Demand
      Avid_Demand Subscriber last edited by

      Hi,

      Let's say I have a site located at https://www.example.com, and also have subdirectories setup for different languages. For example:

      https://www.example.com/es_ES/

      https://www.example.com/fr_FR/

      https://www.example.com/it_IT/

      My Spanish version currently has the following hreflang tags and canonical tag implemented:

      My robots.txt file is blocking all of my language subdirectories. For example:

      User-agent:*

      Disallow: /es_ES/

      Disallow: /fr_FR/

      Disallow: /it_IT/

      This setup doesn't seem right. I don't think I should be blocking the language-specific subdirectories via robots.txt

      What are your thoughts?

      Does my hreflang tag and canonical tag implementation look correct to you? Should I be doing this differently?

      I would greatly appreciate your feedback and/or suggestions.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • gfiorelli1
        gfiorelli1 last edited by

        Hi... I'm sorry to tell you that the answer offered by Gaston is not totally correct.

        So, in your Spanish page you have these hreflang and canonical annotations:

        This is not correct because you are not adding also the self-referential hreflang annotation

        Google is very precise about this, and it states its need in the help pages as well in many Googlers tweets and webmaster office hangouts.

        The rel="canonical" is correct. Remember that the self-referential and the alternative href URLs must always be canonicals.

        Finally, regarding the subfolders blocked via robots.txt, yes! that's totally incorrect:

        if you're blocking Googlebot from accessing the Spanish, French and Italian subfolders, then Googlebot won't be able to parse the code of their pages, hence it won't be able to see also the hreflang annotations... with obvious erroneous consequences.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 5
        • GastonRiera
          Gaston Riera @Avid_Demand last edited by

          that's corect.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • Avid_Demand
            Avid_Demand Subscriber @GastonRiera last edited by

            Yes. example.com/en-US/ redirects 301 to example.com

            So, when referencing that version in hreflang will it look like this?

            Is this correct?

            GastonRiera 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • GastonRiera
              Gaston Riera @Avid_Demand last edited by

              So, every page of example.com/en-US/ redirects 301 to example.com/ ?

              If that's the case, then there is no reason in having that folder (/en-US/), just when configuring Hreflang for en-US use the URL without that folder

              Avid_Demand 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • Avid_Demand
                Avid_Demand Subscriber @GastonRiera last edited by

                What do you mean by "exactly the same then there should not be 2 sites"?

                My https://www.example.com/en-US/ 301 redirects to https://www.example.com

                Thoughts?

                GastonRiera 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • GastonRiera
                  Gaston Riera @Avid_Demand last edited by

                  Yeap, those implementations are correct.

                  in order to avoid duplicate content between different language/countries websites, in each page that is present on each site, there should be their corresponding hreflang tag.

                  In your case:
                  And for a sample page: https://www.smarttechMKT.com/es-ES/gastonriera-espanol

                  NOTE, in the case that site.com and site.com/en-us/ are exactly the same then there should not be 2 sites. Just the one without the folder and hreflang tag with en-US should point to that
                  Hope it helps.
                  Best luck.
                  GR

                  Avid_Demand 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • Avid_Demand
                    Avid_Demand Subscriber @GastonRiera last edited by

                    Thank you for the response, Gaston! I really appreciate it.

                    So you are certain that my hreflang and canonical tags are implemented correctly? For example, my Spanish version (https://www.example.com/es_ES/😞

                    Is this implementation correct?

                    Also, will I have any duplicate content issues with these different language versions?

                    GastonRiera 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                    • GastonRiera
                      Gaston Riera last edited by

                      Hello there,

                      Watch out your question, there is a site there. If its your clients, edit it.

                      Canonical and hreflang seems OK. 
                      Blocking other languages/countries is wrong. There you are allowing google to see ONLY the us version.

                      For further reading, take a look at these articles:
                      Hreflang:
                      Multi-regional and multilingual sites - Google Search Console
                      International checklist - Moz Blog
                      Using the correct hreglang tag - Moz Blog
                      Guide to international website expansion - Moz Blog
                      Tool for checking hreflang anotations - Moz Blog Canonicals:
                      SEO Best Practices for Canonical URLs + the Rel=Canonical Tag - Whiteboard Friday Consolidate duplicate URLs - Google Search Console Help

                      Hope it helps.
                      Best Luck.
                      GR.

                      Hope it helps.
                      Best luck.
                      GR.

                      Avid_Demand 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

                      • Alex_Pisa

                        "Duplicate without user-selected canonical” - impact to SERPs

                        canonical international seo

                        Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice. Scenario
                        We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains. Goal
                        We want local domains (be, ch, fr, etc.) to appear in SERPs and also comply with Google policy of local language variants and/or canonical links. Current solution
                        Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default": <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" /> Issue
                        After Googlebot crawled the websites we see lot of “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in Coverage/Excluded report (Google Search Console) for most domains. When we inspect some of those URLs we can see Google has decided that canonical URL points to (example): User-declared canonical: None
                        Google-selected canonical: …same page, but on a different domain Strange is that even those URLs are on Google and can be found in SERPs. Obviously Google doesn’t know what to make of it. We noticed many websites in the same scenario use a self-referencing approach which is not really “kosher” - we are afraid if we use the same approach we can get penalized by Google. Question: What do you suggest to fix the “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in our scenario? Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks. Regards.

                        International SEO | | Alex_Pisa
                        0
                      • Substance-create

                        How do hreflang attributes affect ranking?

                        We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate?  How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?

                        International SEO | | Substance-create
                        0
                      • Netleaf.ca

                        Worldwide and Europe hreflang implementation.

                        Hi Moz ! We're having quite a discussion here and I'd like to have some inputs. Let me explain the situation and what we plan to do so far. One of our client has two separate markets : World and Europe. Both pages versions will be mostly the same, except for the fact that they will have their own products. So basically, we'd want to show only the European EN version to Europe and the standard EN version to the rest of the world, same goes for FR and ES. As far as IT, DE, CS and SK, they will only be present within the european version. Since we cannot target all Europe with a single hreflang tag, we might have to do it for every single european countries. Regarding this subject, SMX Munich recently had quite an interesting session about this topic with a confirmation coming from John Mueller saying that we can target a single URL more than once with different hreflang tags. You can read more here : http://www.rebelytics.com/multiple-hreflang-tags-one-url/ So having all this in mind, here's the implementation we plan to do : www.example.com/en/ Self canonical www.example.com/fr/ - hreflang = fr www.example.com/es/ - hreflang = es www.example.eu/it/ - hreflang = it www.example.eu/de/ - hreflang = de www.example.eu/cs/ - hreflang = cs www.example.eu/sk/ - hreflang = sk www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = be-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = ch-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = cz-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = de-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = es-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = fr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = uk-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = gr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = hr-fr etc… . This will be done for all european countries (FR, EN and ES). www.example.com/en/ - x-default Let me know what you guys think. Thanks!

                        International SEO | | Netleaf.ca
                        0
                      • muzzmoz

                        How to avoid duplication across multiple country domains

                        Here's the scenario: I have a client currently running one Shopify site (AU) They want to launch three more country domains (US, UK and EU) They want each to be a standalone site, primarily so the customers can purchase in their local currency, which is not possible from a single Shopify site The inventory is all from the same source The product desscriptions will all be the same as well Question: How do we avoid content duplication (ie. how will canonical tags work in this scenario)?

                        International SEO | | muzzmoz
                        0
                      • ennovators

                        Hreflang for bilingual website in the same region/location

                        Hi everyone, got a quick question concerning the hreflang tag. I have a website with 2 different language versions targeting to the same region(Reason: The area is bilingual however not everyone speaks the other language fluently) Question:
                        Can I use hreflang in that case like: Many thanks in advance

                        International SEO | | ennovators
                        0
                      • edward-may

                        HELP: Incorrect Meta Tag description showing for the wrong search results

                        Hi Guys I'm stuck here! I have update the hreftags, updated the sitemaps. I have 3 top level domains and my zenory.com site is showing for the home page the wrong meta tag description, as you can see in the attachement the meta tag is showing the new zealand site meta tag description which is for zenory.co.nz Anyone know what might be going on here? I have also fetched the home page through WMT as well and its still returning the same results any advice would be much appreciated! Thanks

                        International SEO | | edward-may
                        0
                      • mat-relevance

                        Is there any reason to get a massive decrease on indexed pages?

                        Hi, I'm helping on SEO for a big e-commerce in LatAm and one thing we've experienced during the last months is that our search traffic had reduced and the indexed pages had decreased in a terrible way. The site had over 2 Million indexed pages (which was way too much, since we believe that around 10k would be more than enough to hold the over 6K SKUs) but now this number has decreased to less than 3K in less than 2 months. I've also noticed that most of the results in which the site is still appearing are .pdf or .doc files but not actual content on the website. I've checked the following: Robots (there is no block, you can see that on the image as well) Webmaster Tools Penalties Duplicated content I don't know where else to look for. Can anyone help? Thanks in advance! cpLwX1X

                        International SEO | | mat-relevance
                        0
                      • StevenHowe

                        Ranking issues for UK vs US spelling - advice please

                        Hi guys, I'm reaching out here for what may seem to be a very simple and obvious issue, but not something I can find a good answer for. We have a .com site hosted in Germany that serves our worldwide audience. The site is in English, but our business language is British (UK) English. This means that we rank very well for (e.g.) optimisation software but optimization software is nowhere to be found. The cause of this to me seems obvious; a robot reading those two phrases sees two distinct words. Nonetheless, having seen discussions of a similar nature around the use of plurals in keywords, it would seem to me that Google should have this sort of thing covered. Am I right or wrong here? If I'm wrong, then what are my options? I really don't want to have to make a copy of the entire site; apart from the additional effort involved in content upkeep I see this path fraught with duplicate content issues. Any help is very much appreciated, thanks.

                        International SEO | | StevenHowe
                        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.