Use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
-
Google states that use of rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended when:
-
You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post.
-
Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland.
-
Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.
Does this mean that if I write new content in different language for a website hosted on my sub-domain, I should not use this tag?
Regards,
Shailendra Sial
-
-
Looking at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html and http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077, you would only want to implement rel=alternate tags when the content is duplicate content. So if you write new content in a different language on a subdomain that doesn't appear on your main domain in a different language, don't specify a rel=alternate. If it's a translation of content on your main domain, go ahead and add it.
The difference in the implementation when you have pages with completely different languages vs. small regional differences is if the pages are in completely different languages, you won't want to implement canonical tags pointing to one of the variations.
Re-reading through those articles, it's not 100% clear to me what adding this does when you don't implement the canonical tags. Google says "This markup tells Google's algorithm to consider all of these pages as alternate versions of each other."
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
-
Is Chamber of Commerce membership a "paid" link, breaking Google's rules?
Hi guys, This drives me nuts. I hear all the time that any time value is exchanged for a link that it technically violates Google's guidelines. What about real organizations, chambers of commerce, trade groups, etc. that you are a part of that have online directories with DO-follow links. On one hand people will say these are great links with real value outside of search and great for local SEO..and on the other hand some hardliners are saying that these technically should be no-follow. Thoughts???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RickyShockley0 -
Community Discussion - What's the ROI of "pruning" content from your ecommerce site?
Happy Friday, everyone! 🙂 This week's Community Discussion comes from Monday's blog post by Everett Sizemore. Everett suggests that pruning underperforming product pages and other content from your ecommerce site can provide the greatest ROI a larger site can get in 2016. Do you agree or disagree? While the "pruning" tactic here is suggested for ecommerce and for larger sites, do you think you could implement a similar protocol on your own site with positive results? What would you change? What would you test?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattRoney2 -
Hreflang targeted website using the root directory's description & title
Hi there, Recently I applied the href lang tags like so: Unfortunately, the Australian site uses the same description and title as the US site (which was the root directory initially), am i doing something wrong? Would appreciate any response, thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | oliverkuchies0 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Using Canonical Attribute
Hi All, I am hoping you can help me? We have recently migrated to the Umbraco CMS and now have duplicate versions of the same page showing on different URLs. My understanding is that this is one of the major reasons for the rel=canonical tag. So am I right in saying that if I add the following to the page that I want to rank then this will work? I'm just a little worried as I have read some horror stories of people implementing this attribute incorrectly and getting into trouble. Thank you in advance
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Creditsafe0 -
Why is Google rewriting titles with the brandname @ the front followed with a conon " : " i.e. > Brandname: the rest of the title
Example: https://www.google.nl/search?q=providercheck.nl&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a#bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&ei=9xUCUuH6DYPePYHSgKgJ&fp=96e0b845c2047734&q=www.providercheck.nl&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&sa=X&spell=1&ved=0CC4QBSgA Look @ the first result: www.providercheck.nl
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Zanox0 -
Pagination: rel="next" rel="prev" in ?
With Google releasing that instructional on proper pagination I finally hunkered down and put in a site change request. I wanted the rel="next" and rel="prev" implemented… and it took two weeks for the guy to get it done. Brutal and painful. When I looked at the source it turned out he put it in the body above the pagination links… which is not what I wanted. I wanted them in the . Before I respond to get it properly implemented I want a few opinions - is it okay to have the rel="next" in the body? Or is it pretty much mandatory to put it in the head? (Normally, if I had full control over this site, I would just do it myself in 2 minutes… unfortunately I don't have that luxury with this site)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeTheBoss1 -
Yoast meta description in ' ' instead of " " problem
Hi Guys this is really strange, i am using yoast seo for wordpress on two sites. On both sites i am seeing meta name='description' instead of meta name="description" And this is why google is probably not reading it correctly, on many other link submission sites which read your meta data automatically say site blocked. How to i fix this? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SamBuck0