HREF LANG: Different navigation/structure per country: is that a problem?
-
Hi all,
One question about the href lang tag. Our webshop sells to 4 different countries (the Netherlands, Germany, Belgium & Spain).
The navigation is a little bit different for these countries, depending on how popular certain product categories are in certain countries. So, for example:
Netherlands --> Category A and B are in the top navigation
Germany --> Category B is a subcategory of product A.We want to implement the Hreflang tag, would it be a problem that the navigation/site structure (and therefore the URL structure for certain categories) are a bit different?
So:
The url for category B in the Netherlands is: https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/
The url for category B in Germany is: https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/Thanks in advance!
Best!
-
Thank you for your detailed reply! All clear, we will move forward with the implementation, carefully 'matching' the corresponding URL's of course :).
-
I don't immediately see an issue with presenting slightly different navs to satisfy these different user types–in fact, what it sounds like you're doing is presenting a better localized experience based on what's most popular in those countries.
As long as your hreflang tags have the correct alternate links for corresponding international pages, you should be okay. For instance:
In the head tags on this page https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/ make sure you have <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.website.com="" de="" category-a="" category-b="" "hreflang="de-de">as the alternate German link for that page. Conversely, on the German version https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ make sure you have <link rel="alternate" href="https: www.website.com="" nl="" category-b="" " hreflang="nl-nl">as the alternate Netherlands version of that page.</link rel="alternate" href="https:></link rel="alternate" href="https:>
You'll need to ensure that you have the correct corresponding URLs for each of your other targeted countries. If we were to use the above example for https://www.website.com/nl/category-B/ and only had the German equivalent of the page as the alternate link (<link < span="">rel="alternate" href="https://www.website.com/de/category-A/category-B/ "hreflang="de-de">), we'd be missing the other countries we target (Spain and Belgium). So make sure you include them as well!</link <>
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
-
Structuring sentences after keyword research
Hello, Once I have done your keyword research is there way to write other than "naturally" which is what everyone says ? Could someone explain what they mean by naturally. For example let's say my keyword is Piedmont bike tour, some of the words I find through my research are cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine etc... Is there a way to integrate those so that google understands what I mean. I imagine that google parses sentences for s reason and imagine that if I only sprinkle those words like in the sentence below it won't work. Piedmont bike tour, cycle, routes, piedmont, barolo, wine all this is cool ! Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Staging/Development Site Indexed?
So, my company's site has been pretty tough to try to get moving in the right direction on Google's SERPs. I had believed that it was mainly due to having a shortage of back links and a horrible home page load time. Everything else seems to be set up pretty well. I was messing around and used the site: Google search operator for our staging site. I found stage.site.com and a lot of our other staging pages in the search results. I have to think that this is the problem and causing a duplicate content penalty of the entire site. I guess I now need to 301 redirect the entire site? Has anyone every had this issue before and have fixed it? Thanks for any help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aua0 -
Why do some reputable publishers have problems with their microdata?
I'm using the Google Structured Data Testing Tool to test: https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool NY Times and Women's Health being two good examples. These two reputable publishers don't seem to have the microdata they've implemented recognized. Are they doing something wrong or is there a problem with the tool?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Edward_Sturm1 -
What is the Good URL structure for Blog posts
Please let me know what is the goood URL structure for blog posts http://www.abc.com/postname/ or http://www.abc.com/�tegory%/%postname% If Category, Can we name it Blog like website/blog/postname or it is good to use actual categories, and How many categories we can use?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Michael.Leonard0 -
How to do Country specific indexing ?
We are a business that operate in South East Asian countries and have medical professionals listed in Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia. When I go to Google Philippines and check I can see indexing of pages from all countries and no Philippines pages. Philippines is where we launched recently. How can I tell Google Philippines to give more priority to pages from Philippines and not from other countries Can someone help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ozil0 -
Traffic by Country: Is It Possible to Change it?
Let's say you have a .ng domain but you receive more traffic from USA than from Nigeria. Let's say you want traffic only from Nigeria. How do you correct this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YESdesign0 -
Problems with a NoIndex NoFollow Site
For legal reasons my website is going to launch non-branded websites. We do not have the capacity to make these site sufficiently unique from the main site so we are planning on having them be NoIndex NoFollow. Are there any potential SEO problems here? What will the implication be if in ~1-2 years from launching the NoIndex NoFollow we make the site unique, take away the tag and want to start promoting these sites organically. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0 -
How should i best structure my internal links?
I am new to SEO and looking to employ a logical but effective internal link strategy. Any easy ways to keep track of what page links to what page? I am a little confused regarding anchor text in as much as how I should use this. e.g. for a category page "Towels", I was going to link this to another page we want to build PA for such as "Bath Sheets". What should I put in for anchor text? keep it simple and just put "Bath Sheets" or make it more direct like "Buy Bath Sheets". Should I also vary anchor text if i have another 10 pages internally linking to this or keep it the same. Any advise would be really helpful. Thanks Craig
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus0