How important is using hreflang if u have plenty of other geo signals ?

[Dan-Lawrence]

HI

How important is it to use the hreflang attributes and supporting sitemaps (and do you need both) ?

Since if sites are being set up on country specific tlds (but on top of WP multisite network.domain.com environment) and geotargeted in GWT, as well as country meta tags and local schema etc etc that should send enough signals shouldnt it ?

Implementation of hreflang seems like an absolute technical nightmare

All Best

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi Kristina

Thanks for commenting and for the link, useful stuff

Re the flow chart i interpret that as saying that if we are creating a sub site in a different language to target a different country (on the WP MS network.domain.com/tr network but domain mapped to its own country spedcific TLD), unless that country has multiple language versions used then we don't need to use hreflang and that geotargeting in GWT will suffice ? So really only time i need to use hreflang on top of geotargeting in GWT will be when very similar content in very similar languages (such as US English pages targeting USA google, and UK English pages targeting UK google)

Re hreflang though - the dev have already set up custom fields for me so we at least have the option for as & when we may need to add hreflang to the pages:

So am i right in thinking we add one hreflang tag to each page for each language version of it ? (so we end up with as many hreflangs on each page, referencing the alternate page relevant to that country code, as there are different language versions of the page ?)

If so then the system is now set up for this but their asking me If I only ever want to add one tag to each page - effectively one that defines the language of the page you are on, then I could have a much simpler system than the one they have built! I take it the answer is no since we now have and want the above former solution ?

Also the WP MS system uses Yoast that we ideally want for various seo reasons. It adds a canonical tag and theres some discussion out there re using hreflang tag and canonical together may cause issues, so is it best to keep canonical via Yoast or aks dev to suppress Yoast so no canonical ?

Sorry for more questions and thanks for your help !!

All Best

Dan

[KristinaKledzik]

You only really need to use hreflang in either the XML sitemaps OR on the page: not both. Google's pretty smart!

For more detailed info about how to optimize for international SEO, I like to use Kate's tool: https://www.distilled.net/blog/seo/choose-your-international-strategy-tool/ 

Best,

Kristina