HREF LANG: Different navigation/structure per country: is that a problem?

[AMAGARD]

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!

[AMAGARD]

Thank you for your detailed reply! All clear, we will move forward with the implementation, carefully 'matching' the corresponding URL's of course :).

[zeehj]

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 <>