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.
Using hreflang="en" instead of hreflang="en-gb"
-
Hello,
I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally.
We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands.
My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg).
Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions.
Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines?
Thank you,
-
The .co.uk domain is already geo-targeted to the UK, so unless you are targeting other countries/languages
-
I am going to use https://www.ukassignment.co.uk"> for my website I hope it is help to work in UK.
-
From my understanding if you have hreflang=“en-gb” then that/those pages are targeted at the UK. If you wish to target any English speaking countries then you add hreflang=“en”. But if you wish to target specific English speaking countries then you'd use hreflang="en-ie", hreflang="en-gg" etc.
What you are doing is giving Google information, not a directive, as to what pages are targeted for where. Google could ignore and it's not a ranking solution. You are just giving Google the heads up of your intentions.
-
Hi,
According to this article by Moz on hreflang, yes, having an hreflang tag with the language only will help you cast your net out to English speaking searchers from other regions.
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
-
Rel="prev" / "next"
Hi guys, The tech department implemented rel="prev" and rel="next" on this website a long time ago.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdenaSEO
We also added a canonical tag to the 'own' page. We're talking about the following situation: https://bit.ly/2H3HpRD However we still see a situation where a lot of paginated pages are visible in the SERP.
Is this just a case of rel="prev" and "next" being directives to Google?
And in this specific case, Google deciding to not only show the 1st page in the SERP, but still show most of the paginated pages in the SERP? Please let me know, what you think. Regards,
Tom1 -
Using CSS to hide anchor text
Hi all, In my website, I would like to use CSS to set the anchor text to "website design service"(my company provides web design service) but show the button text as "website", due to some artistic reasons. Therefore, the anchor text for the link is "website design service" but what users see is "websites". Does this sound spammy to Google? Is it a risky move that might hurt my SEO? Looking for some advises here. Thank you very much. Best,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Competitor Title, can I use the same???
there are some pages, my competitor is ranking well and also, we have done page optimization it is 100% for page title keywords as im going to use the same title of the competitor? Will this affect me? Pls suggest wht should I do..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1190 -
Rel="self" and what to do with it?
Hey there Mozzers, Another question about a forum issue I encountered. When a forum thread has more than just one page as we all know the best course of action is to use rel="next" rel="prev" or rel="previous" But my forum automatically creates another line in the header called Rel="self" What that does is simple. If i have 3 pages http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Angelos_Savvaidis
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3 **instead of this ** On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc2 On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc3: it creates this On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 So as you can see it creates a url by adding the ?page=1 and names it rel=self which actually gives back a duplicate page because now instead of just http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1 I also have the same page at http://www.example.com/article?story=abc1?page=1 Do i even need rel="self"? I thought that rel="next" and rel="prev" was enough? Should I change that?0 -
Will the use of lightbox affect SEO?
I am looking to condense a features list on my pricing page. it is currently a static list however I want the user to click a button and a full list of standard features will pop up in a lightbox. How will this affect my SEO? Can Google read content in a lightbox?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ParkerSoftware0 -
Using disavow tool for 404s
Hey Community, Got a question about the disavow tool for you. My site is getting thousands of 404 errors from old blog/coupon/you name it sites linking to our old URL structure (which used underscores and ended in .jsp). It seems like the webmasters of these sites aren't answering back or haven't updated their sites in ages so it's returning 404 errors. If I disavow these domains and/or links will it clear out these 404 errors in Google? I read the GWT help page on it, but it didn't seem to answer this question. Feel free to ask any questions that may help you understand the issue more. Thanks for your help,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IceIcebaby
-Reed0 -
Using pictures from another domain
We are building several sites for several clients which will be using images from the manufacturer. Our dev team wants to insert the manufacturer's url for the images, instead of actually downloading the image and hosting on our server. There are thousands of images, so downloading images to our server will be time consuming, so we are looking for a shortcut.... however I'm concerned this will cause other issues. Is using manufactueresdomain.com/12345.jpg going to cause SEO issues? will this generate Google penalties? Since we are not able to control the image file name, we cannot optimize it. We will add Alt text and Title tag for each image, but the file name is random characters. How important is the file name for SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Branden_S0 -
Using subdomains for related landing pages?
Seeking subdomain usage and related SEO advice... I'd like to use multiple subdomains for multiple landing pages all with content related to the main root domain. Why?...Cost: so I only have to register one domain. One root domain for better 'branding'. Multiple subdomains that each focus on one specific reason & set of specific keywords people would search a solution to their reason to hire us (or our competition).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nodiffrei0