International SEO Difficulty With Hreflang

[Tz_Seo]

Hi,

It seems that multilingual sites can be very tricky sometimes. This is the second problem we are facing with a client this month...

A company which already has a presence in Spain wants to expand now in Portugal, Brazil and Argentina.

There are some linguistic differences between Spain Spanish and Argentina Spanish so we will have a slightly different content but same url (check below)

We will also cover the linguistic differences between Portuguese and Brazilian but with different urls, so we will have 4 pages serving the same content in 3 ( technically 4 ) different languages:

company.com/idioma -> (original Spain Spanish page - url stays the same.)

company.com/es-ar/idioma (Argentina url)

company.com/pt-pt/idioma (Portugal url)

company.com/pt-br/lingua (Brazil url)

Normally we know we should use alternate hreflang to all 4 pages, but now that the url changes, e.g between Argentina and Brazil, the case is the same or we can omit it for these two countries?

Thank you!

[Tz_Seo]

Hey there,

Thank you all for helping with this...

[gfiorelli1]

Yup, you're correct.

About the order, sincerely I don't think it affects the hreflang functionality, but using the right order is helpful for better reading the code when analyzing it.

[jorisbrabants]

Thanks Gianluca,

so if I'm correct the English page would include

etc.

and add the same code to the /fr page and /pt page. Does it matter in what order they are placed (English hreflang at the top for English page, French hreflang at the top on the French page)?

[gfiorelli1]

If your site is multilingual, hence not expressly targeting any country but users speaking a given language, then you DON'T have to use the country ISO code in the hreflang (ES, IT, DE), but only the language ISO code.

[jorisbrabants]

We're having a similar situation on our site, but  I'm a bit confused with the info I found here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

It's multilingual (7 languages) which are set up like this:

site.com/en
site.com/es
site.com/pt
etc.

I know I should add the hreflang tag on each page AND add the href with link to corresponding page in the other languages, but is it enough to just use hreflang="en" or should I also add en-us & en-uk to the english pages? Same for the pt version. Should I just add hreflang="pt" or specify Portugal and Brazil?

[gfiorelli1]

What Patrick wrote is substantially correct.

On the other hand, in the specific case of your Spanish and Portuguese versions, you may consider to not use all four hreflang annotations but for their "home pages", but only using hreflang for better geotarget the two different Spanish version in case of the Spanish and Argentinian versions and the two different Portuguese one in the case of the Portuguese and Brazilian versions.

I say this because even without the hreflang, Google have enough data to understand that one page is targeting Portugal and not Spanish (different language, different geo-targeting in Search Console/Webmaster Tools, possibly a well located Spanish for Spain, currency - if it is an Ecommerce -, address...).

Not so clear would be in the case of Portugal Portuguese and Brazil Portuguese... that why I suggest to maintain the usage of the hreflang when language is common.

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

If I am understanding right, you are worried about Argentina and Brazil URL variations having the same hreflang tag? That's fine if it's the same language. You should also take advantage of country targeting in your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, as this will tell crawlers that these URL variations (which you should create a profile for each variation), while having the same languages, serve two different countries.

For Bing, you can also check out language tags.

Hope this helps! Good luck!