Upper case or/and lower case in rel="alternate" hreflang

[MartijnHoving82]

Hi Mozzers,

I have a question about the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, with an example.

When I use two subfolders for two different countries/languages, for instance www.domain.com/nl-nl/ and www.domain.com/nl-en/ (for the English version) and I want to use the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, do I need to follow the ISO standards concerning Uppercase country code and Lowercase language code (en-NL)? Or is it okay to use the Lowercase country and language code (en-nl), since we also use this in the URL of the Subfolder.

What does Google prefer?

Thanks in advance.

[seowoody]

Hey there, Lowercase is fine.

Not sure why you would have /nl-nl/ and /nl-en/ though, it's either English or Dutch, right?

I've set this up many times before and it works just fine, although it's sometimes a little overkill unless you have the English version of a page ranking higher than the Dutch version in Google.nl for example.

I usually find adding these as separate websites in WMT's and setting the target country correctly for each site you shouldn't have any problems.

So add http://www.domain.com/nl/ as its own site in WMT and set target country to Netherlands, then add http://www.domain.com/en/ as another site and set its target country to UK.

Hope this helps,

Goodluck,

Woody