Using hreflang="en" instead of hreflang="en-gb"
-
Hello,
I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally.
We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands.
My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg).
Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions.
Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines?
Thank you,
-
The .co.uk domain is already geo-targeted to the UK, so unless you are targeting other countries/languages
-
I am going to use https://www.ukassignment.co.uk"> for my website I hope it is help to work in UK.
-
From my understanding if you have hreflang=“en-gb” then that/those pages are targeted at the UK. If you wish to target any English speaking countries then you add hreflang=“en”. But if you wish to target specific English speaking countries then you'd use hreflang="en-ie", hreflang="en-gg" etc.
What you are doing is giving Google information, not a directive, as to what pages are targeted for where. Google could ignore and it's not a ranking solution. You are just giving Google the heads up of your intentions.
-
Hi,
According to this article by Moz on hreflang, yes, having an hreflang tag with the language only will help you cast your net out to English speaking searchers from other regions.
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
-
Best to Combine Listing URLs? Are 300 Listing Pages a "Thin Content" Risk?
We operate www.metro-manhattan.com, a commercial real estate website. There about 550 pages. About 300 pages are for individual listings. About 150 are for buildings. Most of the listings pages have 180-240 words. Would it be better from an SEO perspective to have multiple listings on a single page, say all Chelsea listings on the Chelsea neighborhood page? Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by having separate URLs for each listing? Are we at risI for a thin cogent Google penalty? Would the same apply to building pages (about 150)? Sample Listing: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/364-madison-ave-office-lease-1802sf Sample Building: http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/for-a-new-york-office-space-rental-consider-one-worldwide-plaza-825-eighth-avenue My concern is that the existing site architecture may result in some form of Google penalty. If we have to consolidate these pages what would be the best way of doing so? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Can I use two sitemaps?
I have a Magento website. I am going to add a Wordpress blog under /blog. If I setup each with its own webmaster tools to submit a sitemap does it hurt anything?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tylerj0 -
Articles marked with "This site may be hacked," but I have no security issues in the search console. What do I do?
There are a number of blog articles on my site that have started receiving the "This site may be hacked" warning in the SERP. I went hunting for security issues in the Search Console, but it indicated that my site is clean. In fact, the average position of some of the articles has increased over the last few weeks while the warning has been in place. The problem sounds very similar to this thread: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/malware--hacked-sites/wmG4vEcr_l0 but that thread hasn't been touched since February. I'm fearful that the Google Form is no longer monitored. What other steps should I take? One query where I see the warning is "Brand Saturation" and this is the page that has the warning: http://brolik.com/blog/should-you-strive-for-brand-saturation-in-your-marketing-plan/
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Liggins0 -
"No Index" Extensions
Hi there, We run an e-commerce website and we are aware of our duplicate page content/title problems. We know about the "rel canonical" tag and the "no index" tag but I am more interested in the latter. We use a CMS called Magento. Now, Magento has an extension that allows you to use the "no follow" and "no index" tag on products. Google has indexed many of our pages and I wanted to know if applying the "no index" tag on duplicate pages will instruct Google to remove the duplicate url's it has already indexed. I know the tag will tell Google not to index a page but what if I apply it to a product already indexed?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | iBags0 -
Do image "lightbox" photo gallery links on a page count as links and dilute PageRank?
Hi everyone, On my site I have about 1,000 hotel listing pages, each which uses a lightbox photo gallery that displays 10-50 photos when you click on it. In the code, these photos are each surrounded with an "a href", as they rotate when you click on them. Going through my Moz analytics I see that these photos are being counted by Moz as internal links (they point to an image on the site), and Moz suggests that I reduce the number of links on these pages. I also just watched Matt Cutt's new video where he says to disregard the old "100 links max on a page" rule, yet also states that each link does divide your PageRank. Do you think that this applies to links in an image gallery? We could just switch to another viewer that doesn't use "a href" if we think this is really an issue. Is it worth the bother? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
What is a "Bad Link" in Google's eyes? Low DA?
Hi there, I'm going through my link profile and I noticed I have a few links that are from <10 DA sites. One has a DA of 6. Should I remove these? Aside from any referral traffic I receive from these links (I know there is none), are these links hurting me?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Travis-W
What should I look out for in a site I may guest post on? Thanks!
Travis0 -
Help with setting up 301 redirects from /default.aspx to the "/" in ASP.NET using MasterPages?
Hi SEOMoz Moderators and Staff, My web developer and I are having a world of trouble setting up the best way to 301 redirect from www.tisbest.org/default.aspx to the www.tisbest.org since we're using session very heavily for our ASP.NET using MasterPages. We're hoping for some help since our homepage has dropped 50+ positions for all of our search terms since our first attempt at setting this up 10 days ago. = ( A very bad result. We've rolled back the redirects after realizing that our session system was redirecting www.tisbest.org back to www.tisbest.org/default.aspx?AutoDetectCookieSupport=1 which would redirect to a URL with the session ID like this one: http://www.tisbest.org/(S(whukyd45tf5atk55dmcqae45))/Default.aspx which would then redirect again and throw the spider into an unending redirect loop. The Google gods got angry, stopped indexing the page, and we are now missing from our previous rankings though, thankfully, several of our other pages do still exist on Google. So, has anyone dealt with this issue? Could this be solved by simply resetting up the 301 redirects and also configuring ASP.NET to recognize Google's spider as supporting cookies and thus not serving it the Session ID that has caused issue for us in the past? Any help (even just commiserating!) would be great. Thanks! Chad
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TisBest0 -
What's the "most valuable indirectly related skill" to SEO worth learning?
Hi, All! I have a little time on my hands that's not taken up by client work or our own marketing. What would you say is a skill worth learning during that time? My background is not techie, so while I've picked up a teeny bit of knowledge about code, etc. on the way, I still don't really know how to code, use APIs, etc. So I was thinking something along those lines, but anyone have specific suggestions? And resources for whatever you suggest? Thanks! Aviva
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | debi_zyx0