Hreflang and canonicalization
-
When using hreflang in order to deliver the relevant version in SERs, should we also make use of a reference to a canonical version to avoid duplication?
Currently, we provide different regional versions of our content where the content is largely the same aside from minor changes due to spelling, units of measurement although occasionally larger amends are required.
We have implemented hreflang referencing all the alternative country Urls, e.g en-us, en-gb, en-aus etc but also specificied the canonical as the en-gb version since we are a UK based website and the majority of the content originated from the UK version of our site.
Recently, our rankings across all countries have been falling markedly and I'm wondering whether the canonical element may be at fault. We have not been engaging in any black hat activities that might have been responsible for any sort of fall.
When we implemented the hreflang and canonical in July 2012 our traffic has actually been increasing significantly until literally 21 Nov when the search traffic is plummeting considerably across all countries. It would be useful to know if you need to specify a canonical version when using hreflang or could there be another reason for our ranking falls.
Many thanks in advance of your assistance.
-
you can test it out and remove the canonical for the not fully equivalent pages ... and unfortunately there is no other solution than a canonical to fix the pages that have a fully equivalent content.
just test it out and keep a close eye on it and please do update this thread
thank u
-
Thanks Wissam. I posted the same question in a Google forum and was told that I should remove the canonical reference (but retain the hrelang elements) as some of the content was not entirely identical and had regional differences.
I've asked whether I should do the same (i.e not specify a canonical) when the content is entirely identical but equally relevant to different countries. Would the hreflang be enough to prevent them being considered duplicate?
-
Hi Simon
I think the implementation you did on the site is confusing and wrong.
you consolidated ur au to the .com domain without specifying which folder or subdomainis the au section is.
previously because you have the .com.au in the domain Google understood that signal that this website is relevant to au visitors. but when you consolidated to the .com you need now to TELL or HINT to Google (through Google Webmaster Tools) where the whole domain that was targeting this country went.
and HREFLANG is not about Geotargeting but about the Language.
-
Hi Wissam, yes indeed all the pages are informative article pages. I want each country specific version to rank highly in it's own country i.e en-us article to rank in US, en-au in Australia etc. Does specifying a canonical strangle your ranking in all the other countries?
-
Google has actually updated their Google webmaster help section of the hreflang and remove the reference of rel canonical because people tend to get confused and implemented incorrectly.
so my question to you are these pages informational pages? are they fully equivalent to the others ? in aus and us ?
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
-
Index Bloat: Canonicalize, Redirect or Delete URLs?
I was doing some simple on-page recommendations for a client and realized that they have a bit of a website bloat problem. They are an ecommerce shoe store and for one product, there could be 10+ URLs. For example, this is what ONE product looks like: example.com/products/shoename-color1 example.com/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/style/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/adifferentstyle/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/shop-latest-styles/products/shoename-color2 example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color1 example.com/collections/all/products/shoename-color2 ...and so on... all for the same shoe. They have about 20-30 shoes altogether, and some come in 4-5 colors. This has caused some major bloat on their site and I assume some confusion for the search engine. That said, I'm trying to figure out what the best way to tackle this is from an SEO perspective. Here's where I've gotten to so far: Is it better to canonicalize all URLs, referencing back to one "main" one, delete all bloat pages re-link everything to the main one(s), or 301 redirect the bloat URLs back to the "main" one(s)? Or is there another option that I haven't considered? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AJTSEO0 -
International SEO and duplicate content: what should I do when hreflangs are not enough?
Hi, A follow up question from another one I had a couple of months ago: It has been almost 2 months now that my hreflangs are in place. Google recognises them well and GSC is cleaned (no hreflang errors). Though I've seen some positive changes, I'm quite far from sorting that duplicate content issue completely and some entire sub-folders remain hidden from the SERP.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GhillC
I believe it happens for two reasons: 1. Fully mirrored content - as per the link to my previous question above, some parts of the site I'm working on are 100% similar. Quite a "gravity issue" here as there is nothing I can do to fix the site architecture nor to get bespoke content in place. 2. Sub-folders "authority". I'm guessing that Google prefers sub-folders over others due to their legacy traffic/history. Meaning that even with hreflangs in place, the older sub-folder would rank over the right one because Google believes it provides better results to its users. Two questions from these reasons:
1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong? 2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Instead of trying to fix and "promote" hidden sub-folders, I'm thinking to actually reinforce the results I'm getting from stronger sub-folders.
I.e: if a user based in belgium is Googling something relating to my site, the site.com/fr/ subfolder shows up instead of the site.com/be/fr/ sub-sub-folder.
Or if someone is based in Belgium using Dutch, he would get site.com/nl/ results instead of the site.com/be/nl/ sub-sub-folder. Therefore, I could canonicalise /be/fr/ to /fr/ and do something similar for that second one. I'd prefer traffic coming to the right part of the site for tracking and analytic reasons. However, instead of trying to move mountain by changing Google's behaviour (if ever I could do this?), I'm thinking to encourage the current flow (also because it's not completely wrong as it brings traffic to pages featuring the correct language no matter what). That second question is the main reason why I'm looking out for MoZ's community advice: am I going to damage the site badly by using canonical tags that way? Thank you so much!
G0 -
x-default hreflang attribute value
Hi When is it best to use the x-default hreflang attribute value tags? Screaming frog is flagging lots as missing, but is it necessary? Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BeckyKey0 -
Hreflang : mixing with/without country code for same language
Hello, I would like to display 3 different english versions of my website : 1 for UK, 1 for CA and 1 for other english users. It would look like this for a page: . (english content with £ prices) <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en-ca" hreflang="en-CA">(english content with $CA prices)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en="" " hreflang="en">(english content without currency)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> I wonder if I can mix this hreflang without country code with hreflangs with country code for the 2 other specific versions... or if the hreflang without country code version will appear whatever the country, even if i specified it . In other terms, is hreflang="en" > hreflang="en-CA" + hreflang="en-GB" if tagged together on a same page? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexisH0 -
Why is a canonicalized URL still in index?
Hi Mozers, We recently canonicalized a few thousand URLs but when I search for these pages using the site: operator I can see that they are all still in Google's index. Why is that? Is it reasonable to expect that they would be taken out of the index? Or should we only expect that they won't rank as high as the canonical URLs? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | yaelslater0 -
Hreflang in vs. sitemap?
Hi all, I decided to identify alternate language pages of my site via sitemap to save our development team some time. I also like the idea of having leaner markup. However, my site has many alternate language and country page variations, so after creating a sitemap that includes mostly tier 1 and tier 2 level URLs, i now have a sitemap file that's 17mb. I did a couple google searches to see is sitemap file size can ever be an issue and found a discussion or two that suggested keeping the size small and a really old article that recommended keeping it < 10mb. Does the sitemap file size matter? GWT has verified the sitemap and appears to be indexing the URLs fine. Are there any particular benefits to specifying alternate versions of a URL in vs. sitemap? Thanks, -Eugene
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | eugene_bgb0 -
Site migration from non canonicalized site
Hi Mozzers - I'm working on a site migration from a non-canonicalized site - I am wondering about the best way to deal with that - should I ask them to canonicalize prior to migration? Many thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Any Case Study of Reversion of Canonicalization?
Hi, Understand that if a Page A is being canonicalized to Page B, most probably Page B's ranking will increase (given their content and structure are all the same). But when the canonical tags are removed from Page B, Page A's rankings and traffic may recover to the original before it was canonicalized. The theories seem very true but does anyone have any case studies or direct experiences which proves these theories? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0