Multiple hreflang tags

[Bdig]

I'm trying to advise on the multi country seo for a site in terms of markup. We've already decided on using sub folders rather than separate sites or subdomains due to an established link profile and good rankings in all countries. The question is in relation to the homepage. Obviously this is the page most likely to rank well in any country (the site is a .com). But can multiple hreflang tags be put on the page to say that the page targets many countries? Or would leaving the hreflang tag off allow it to just rank for all countries?

Also do Yahoo and Bing follow hreflang tags? I can't find any info on this anywhere!

Thanks very much in advance for any help!

[SEOBirmingham81]

Hi Gregory,

Did you get any further with your query above? I am considering implementing the same thing...

Thanks,

Dan

[DRUM.SEO]

Does anyone have experience listing multiple countries for a page that serves a region?  This would be used for sites that have regional content pages divided like North America, South America, EMEA (Europe / Middle East / Africa), APAC (Asia / Pacific). For example, can you tag the North America pages en-us and en-ca on the same page so that it targets English for US and Canada?

[Aleyda]

Hi there,

Hreflang annotations serve to inform Google to which language (and additionally if you want to geotarget, country) each of your URL versions are targeted.

You can use the hreflang default annotation, as described here, when you want to show a default URL for a language / country that you're not targeting, which sounds like the situation you describe.

On the other hand, Bing doesn't support hreflang, but you can use the content language meta tag instead that they do take into consideration:

Thanks,

Aleyda

[MattAntonino]

You can definitely have multiple hreflangs.  This is the way to set it up:

The exact syntax to use in the header of the original would look something like this, for a site that has an original in English and alternate versions in Spanish (targeted to the audience in Mexico) and German:

(see: http://returnonnow.com/2012/06/international-seo-hreflang-tag/)

You should also deal with hreflang and alt languages in your sitemap, per: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2620865

I'm also fairly sure that Bing does not support hreflang. Only Google & Yandex do, I believe. I assume that will change as more international sites get their properties setup for Google and other engines want to stay relevant on international search.