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
-
Google indexed "Lorem Ipsum" content on an unfinished website
Hi guys. So I recently created a new WordPress site and started developing the homepage. I completely forgot to disallow robots to prevent Google from indexing it and the homepage of my site got quickly indexed with all the Lorem ipsum and some plagiarized content from sites of my competitors. What do I do now? I’m afraid that this might spoil my SEO strategy and devalue my site in the eyes of Google from the very beginning. Should I ask Google to remove the homepage using the removal tool in Google Webmaster Tools and ask it to recrawl the page after adding the unique content? Thank you so much for your replies.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ibis150 -
Pages with rel "next"/"prev" still crawling as duplicate?
Howdy! I have a site that is crawling as "duplicate content pages" that is really just pagination. The rel next/prev is in place and done correctly but Roger Bot and Google are both showing duplicated content + duplicate page titles & meta's respectively. The only thing I can think of is we have a canonical pointing back at the URL you are on - we do not have a view all option right now and would not feel comfortable recommending it given the speed implications and size of their catalog. Any experience, recommendations here? Something to be worried about? /collections/all?page=15"/>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | paul-bold0 -
Use "If-Modified-Since HTTP header"
I´m working on a online brazilian marketplace ( looks like etsy in US) and we have a huge amount of pages... I´ve been studing a lot about that and I was wondering to use If-Modified-Since so Googlebot could check if the pages have been updated, and if it is not, there is no reason to get a new copy of them since it already has a current copy in the index. It uses a 304 status code, "and If a search engine crawler sees a web page status code of 304 it knows that web page has not been updated and does not need to be accessed again." Someone quoted before me**Since Google spiders billions of pages, there is no real need to use their resources or mine to look at a webpage that has not changed. For very large websites, the crawling process of search engine spiders can consume lots of bandwidth and result in extra cost and Googlebot could spend more time in pages actually changed or new stuff!**However, I´ve checked Amazon, Rakuten, Etsy and few others competitors and no one use it! I´d love to know what you folks think about it 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SeoMartin10 -
Canonical use when dynamically placing items on "all products" page
Hi all, We're trying to get our canonical situation straightened out. We have a section of our site with 100 product pages in it (in our case a city with hotels that we've reviewed), and we have a single page where we list them all out--an "all products" page called "all.html." However, because we have 100 and that's a lot for a user to see at once, we plan to first show only 50 on "all.html." When the user scrolls down to the bottom, we use AJAX to place another 50 on the page (these come from another page called "more.html" and are placed onto "all.html"). So, as you scroll down from the front end, you see "all.html" with 100 listings. We have other listings pages that are sorted and filtered subsets of this list with little or no unique content. Thus, we want to place a canonical on those pages. Question: Should the canonical point to "all.html"? Would spiders get confused, because they see that all.html is only half the listings? Is it dangerous to dynamically place content on a page that's used as a canonical? Is this a non-issue? Thanks, Tom
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomNYC0 -
Appropriate use of rel canonical
Hey Guys,I'm a bit stuck. My on-page grade indicated the following two issues and I need to find how how to fix both issues.If you have a solution, could you please let me know how to address these issues? It's all a bit intimidating at the moment!!Thank you so much..****************************************************************************************************************************************Appropriate Use of Rel Canonical If the canonical tag is pointing to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. Make sure you're targeting the right page (if this isn't it, you can reset the target above) and then change the canonical tag to reference that URL. Recommendation: We check to make sure that IF you use canonical URL tags, it points to the right page. If the canonical tag points to a different URL, engines will not count this page as the reference resource and thus, it won't have an opportunity to rank. If you've not made this page the rel=canonical target, change the reference to this URL. NOTE: For pages not employing canonical URL tags, this factor does not apply. No More Than One Canonical URL Tag The canonical URL tag is meant to be employed only a single time on an individual URL (much like the title element or meta description). To ensure the search engines properly parse the canonical source, employ only a single version of this tag. Recommendation: Remove all but a single canonical URL tag
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | StoryScout1 -
After Receiving a "Googlebot can't access your site" would this stop your site from being crawled?
Hi Everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AMA-DataSet
A few weeks ago now I received a "Googlebot can't access your site..... connection failure rate is 7.8%" message from the webmaster tools, I have since fixed the majority of these issues but iv noticed that all page except the main home page now have a page rank of N/A while the home page has a page rank of 5 still. Has this connectivity issues reduced the page ranks to N/A? or is it something else I'm missing? Thanks in advance.0 -
Received "Googlebot found an extremely high number of URLs on your site:" but most of the example URLs are noindexed.
An example URL can be found here: http://symptom.healthline.com/symptomsearch?addterm=Neck%20pain&addterm=Face&addterm=Fatigue&addterm=Shortness%20Of%20Breath A couple of questions: Why is Google reporting an issue with these URLs if they are marked as noindex? What is the best way to fix the issue? Thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Could large number of "not selected" pages cause a penalty?
My site was penalized for specific pages in the UK On July 28 (corresponding with a Panda update). I cleaned up my website and wrote to Google and they responded that "no manual spam actions had been taken". The only other thing I can think of is that we suffered an automatic penalty. I am having problems with my sitemap and it is indexing many error pages, empty pages, etc... According to our index status we have 2,679,794 not selected pages and 36,168 total indexed. Could this have been what caused the error? (If you have any articles to back up your answers that would be greatly appreciate) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theLotter0