Href lang and multilingual question
-
Greetings Moz-Hive mind! I'm hoping you can help me on the internationalisation conundrum below;
We currently have a website with three distinct 'locales' US, SEA and UK we automatically redirect customers using IP recognition to a locale which matches, we also determine their currency based on IP. The issue we currently have is a lot of duplicate content and no use of href lang or rel=canonical tags etc...
My proposed structure would be to create a locale based directory for the three locales we offer.
- / - being US and most other Worldwide
- /uk - being UK
- /as - being Hong Kong and other Asian territories.
How would you suggest we set up the href lang tags for these? Because technically there are going to be multiple language possibilities within. Our main customers are English only if this helps.
Also as a secondary question, how should I set up the Google Search Console settings for each of these directories?
Many thanks in advance.
-
Thank you so very much!
-
Correct.
About using the hreflang="x-default" or the hreflang="en", that depends if you are interested in targeting also users not searching in English.
If not, you can go for the hreflang="en" option.
-
OK that makes sense. So let me get this straight;
1. USA/Worldwide version - /
- hreflang="en" (Can I use "x-default" here instead?)
- no targeting within Search Console
2. SEA version - /as/
- hreflang="en-HK" (repeat for all SEA territories)
- no targeting within Search Console
3. UK version - /uk/
- hreflang="en-GB"
- targeting United Kingdom on Search Console- use a selector pop up using IP sniffing to detect if the customer is viewing the wrong version of the page/site.
-
A solution could be implementing an alert system (Amazon style), so that people with those characteristics visiting the website and having eventually landed on it (but on / and /uk/ URLs) albeit they are located in HK or other EAS country, they are alerted that the best version of the site for them is the /as/ one.
You can do it via IP detection. Don't do automatic redirection, though.
-
Just to let you know, none of the above has been implemented yet, I am still planning the best course of action.
The majority of our clients browsing from Hong Kong have their language set to "en-US" and "en-GB". Is there a way to target these users without showing them the USA version of the site?
The USA version of the site needs to be the global one because the majority of our clients are based there.
Would you be willing to take this conversation offline into email? I would very much appreciate the help.
-
Mmm... question: do those users visiting the site from Hong Kong or from USA and/or GB?
Because if that is the situation, then you should check out if you have:
- Well implemented the hreflang;
- If you have geo-targeted the /uk/ subfolder to Great Britain/United Kingdom in Search Console.
Said that, following the logic I presented in my first answer, the hreflang="en" should suggest only "/" "(USA) URLs, because you told me that you want the USA version of your site to be also the "Global" one.
If it so, then the "/as/" cannot be paired to the hreflang="en" annotation, because you will have two identical hreflang (hreflang="en") suggesting two different URLs, and that would be wrong and confusing Google so much that it can ignore all the hreflang you may have implemented.
However, in the "home page" of the /as/ subfolder, you should have these hreflang annotations:
- <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-HK" href="http://www.domain.com/as/"></rel="alternate">
- <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="http://www.domain.com/as/"></rel="alternate">
- REPEAT IT SO TO COVER ALL EAS COUNTRIES
- <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="http://www.domain.com/"></rel="alternate">
- <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.domain.com/uk/"></rel="alternate">
- <rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.domain.com/"></rel="alternate">
-
Thanks for your detailed response Gianluca! Very helpful.
One question, am I also able to include hreflang="en" under the /as/ subfolder? Looking at Analytics and 80% of our Hong Kong clients are browsing in either en-US or en-GB (complicated).
-
Your situation is a tricky one, because the SEA area is not a country, and therefore cannot be geo-targeted via Search Console.
To use the hreflang in order to suggest Google to show the /as/ subfolder is possible, though. Simply, you have to implement as many hreflang="en-[Code of the Country] as many are the countries included in the SEA area.
Then, in order to have the USA version being the global one:
-
You should not geo-target it toward USA in Search Console;
-
You should use the hreflang="en" and not the hreflang="en-US" (that will target only users from USA).
-
As an option, you can
-
set up the hreflang="en-US" to suggest google to show / to people using English in the USA;
-
set up the hreflang="x-default" to suggest google to show / to everybody (using English or not), who are not geo-targeted by other hreflang annotations.
Obviously, for UK, you must use the hreflang="en-GB".
-
-
Hey Dmitrii, sorry I should have mentioned in the question I understand how href lang works. I am more asking for the best practice implementation when the language might possibly vary? With US and Worldwide and the Hong Kong and Asian territories.
-
Hi there.
Well, you setup hreflang very normally - on each of those language based pages specify rel="alternate" hreflang="whatever" href="matching url".Refer to this video from Google, they explain pretty good what's what and when to use which version: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
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
-
Question about Topics and subjects of sentences
Hello, This might be a bit of technical question but how is google linking entities together ? I understand that when writing a piece of content I need to cover multiple topics (which are also entities as far as I understand). Then, in order for google to link multiple entities together my guess is that my sentence needs to be written in subject, predicate, object format ? where my topic / entity comes out as the subject of the sentence. For example if I write that: "Tuscany is a famous for it's rolling hills?, here the subject is Tuscany which is what I want as it one of the topics I want to cover. But let's say that instead I write:" Rolling hills is something you find everywhere in Tuscany". Here Tuscany doesn't help because it isn't a subject and is just dropped there, correct ? Concerning the attributs of my entities (the object), does google have a list of what is right of wrong. For example if I say that Washington is the capital of italy ? can I be penalised for that ? I guess this is called entity disambiguation ? If the capital of italy would also be called Washington I believe that I would be ok but see that it isn't, can it hurt ? Thank you,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics0 -
Pop up question and link flow?
Does a pop up like the one on this site www stressfreeprint co uk (top left corner about us, who we are) count as an external link or would link juice not flow to it. I like to have a few pages that i don't want to waste link juice on but would still like to have them and hope this is the answer.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BobAnderson0 -
Http to https question (SSL)
Hi, I recently made two big changes to a site - www.aerlawgroup.com (not smart, I know). First, I changed from Weebly to Wordpress (WP Engine hosting with CDN + Cloudflare - is that overkill?) and I added SSL (http to https). From a technical perspective, I think I made a better site: (1) blazing fast, (2) mobile responsive, (3) more secure. I'm seeing the rankings fluctuate quite a bit, especially on the important keywords. I added SSL to my other sites, and saw no rankings change (they actually all went up slightly). I'm wondering if anyone has had experience going to SSL and can give me feedback on something I might have overlooked. Again, it's strange that all the other sites responded positively, but the one listed above is going in the opposite direction. Maybe there are other problems, and the SSL is just a coincidence. Any feedback would be appreciated. I followed this guide: http://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl - which helped tremendously (FYI).
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | mrodriguez14400 -
A few important mobile SEO questions
I have a few basic questions about mobile SEO. I'd appreciate if any of you fabulous Mozzers can enlighten me. Our site has a parallel mobile site with the same urls, using an m. domain for mobile and www. for desktop. On mobile pages, we have a rel="canonical" tag pointing to the matching desktop URL and on desktop pages we have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to the matching mobile URL. When someone visits a www. page using a mobile device, we 301 them to the mobile version. Questions: 1. Do I want my mobile pages to be indexed by Google? From Tom's (very helpful) answers here, it seems that I only want Google indexing the full site pages and if the mobile pages are indexed it's actually a duplicate content issue. This is really confusing to me since Google knows that it's not duplicate content based on the canonical tag. But - he makes a good point - what is the value of having the mobile page indexed if the same page on desktop is indexed (I know that Google is indexing both because I see them in search results. When I search on mobile Google serves the mobile page and when I search on desktop Google serves me the desktop page.)? Are these pages competing with each other? Currently, we are doing everything we can do ensure that our mobile pages are crawled (deeply) and indexed, but now I'm not sure what the value of this is? Please share your knowledge. 2. Is a mobile page's ranking affected by social shares of the desktop version of the same page? Currently, when someone uses the share buttons on our mobile site, we share the desktop url (www. - not m.). The reason we do this is that we are afraid that if people are sharing our content with 2 different url's (m.mysite.com/some_post and www.mysite.com/some_post) the share count will not be aggregated for both url's. What I'm wondering is: will this have a negative effect on mobile SEO, since it will seem to Google that our mobile pages have no shares, or is this not a problem, since the desktop pages have a rel="alternate" tag pointing to mobile pages, so Google gives the same ranking to the mobile page as the desktop page (which IS being shared)?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | YairSpolter0 -
Question about duplicate listings on site for product listings.
We list products on our site and suspect that we have been hit by Panda as we are duplicating listings across our own site. Not intentionally, we just have multiple pages listings the same content as they fall into multiple categories. Has anyone else had the same issue and if so how did you deal with it?.. Have you seen a change in results/rankings due to the changes you made?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nick-name1230 -
Urgent problem - multilingual website title tag and meta description problem
Hello, Our client websites was ranking in high position in Google for a handful of keywords. Targeted keywords were in the title tag but for some reasons Google is not showing thouse keywords in title tag anymore. Instead Google shows same keywords in different language. I think there are some multilingual title tag problem. Any ideas how to solve it? Thanks guys
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | serp-eesti0 -
Unique Ip Hosting Question
We have aged domains that have had unique ips for some time. Batch 1 average 2 years old and are in 1st to 5th place in their rankings. Batch 2 are 8 months old and not ranking at all. Will there be any issues associated with moving them all to a reseller account with a single ip address? In addition batch 1 that has good rankings with unique ips is there ever a possibility they will change our ips without notice or for any reason at all that will change and or fluctuate our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | shandaman0 -
Image Links Vs. Text Links, Questions About PR & Anchor Text Value
I am searching for testing results to find out the value of text links versus image links with alt text. Do any of you have testing results that can answer or discuss these questions? If 2 separate pages on the same domain were to have the same Page Authority, same amount of internal and external links and virtually carry the same strength and the location of the image or text link is in the same spot on both pages, in the middle of the body within paragraphs. Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of Page Authority and PR as a text link? Would an image link with alt text pass the same amount of textual value as a text link? For example, if the alt text on the image on one page said "nike shoes" and the text link on the other page said "nike shoes" would both pass the same value to drive up the rankings of the page for "nike shoes"? Would a link wrapped around an image and text phrase be better than creating 2 links, one around the image and one around the text pointing to the same page? The following questions have to do with when you have an image and text link on a page right next to each other, like when you link a compelling graphic image to a category page and then list a text link underneath it to pass text link value to the linked-to page. If the image link displays before the text link pointing to a page, would first link priority use the alt text and not even apply the anchor text phrase to the linked page? Would it be best to link the image and text phrase together pointing to the product page to decrease the link count on the page, thus allowing for more page rank and page authority to pass to other pages that are being linked to on the page? And would this also pass anchor text value to the link-to page since the link would include an image and text? I know that the questions sound a bit repetitive, so please let me know if you need any further clarification. I'd like to solve these to further look into ways to improve some user experience aspects while optimizing the link strength on each page at the same time. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abernhardt
Andrew0