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
-
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
72KB CSS code directly in the page header (not in external CSS file). Done for faster "above the fold" loading. Any problem with this?
To optimize for googles page speed, our developer has moved the 72KB CSS code directly in the page header (not in external CCS file). This way the above the fold loading time was reduced. But may this affect indexing of the page or have any other negative side effects on rankings? I made a quick test and google cache seems to have our full pages cached, but may it affect somehow negatively our rankings or that google indexes fewer of our pages (here we have some problems with google ignoring about 30% of our pages in our sitemap".)
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse0 -
Hreflang doubt use correctly
Hello,I have a question, I want to know which option is best for implementing a multi languages. We have a client whose website will have English and Spanish languages, both languages have the same content but English we focus on the US and UK, and Spanish only for the country Spain, the question arises what is the correct nomenclature we use or would it be the best value.**Option 1:****Option 2:**Or any of the two options is correct What would be the correct ?. Another question, if a German user is in Spain, and do a search on (Google Spain), what will be the best option that should be implemented, / is-de / or single / de /, which one will position before ( provided that the statement I is correct). A greeting and thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | omar-moscat0 -
Dealing with Redirects and iFrames - getting "product login" pages to rank
One of our most popular products has a very authoritative product page, which is great for marketing purposes, but not so much for current users. When current users search for "product x login" or "product x sign in", instead of getting to the login page, they see the product page - it adds a couple of clicks to their experience, which is not what we want. One of the problems is that the actual login page has barely any content, and the content that it does carry is wrapped around <iframes>. Due to political and security reasons, the web team is reluctant to make any changes to the page, and one of their arguments is that the login page actually ranks #1 for a few other products (at our company, the majority of logins originate from the same domain). </iframes> To add to the challenge - queries that do return the login page as #1 result (for some of our other products) actually do not reference the sign-in domain, but our old domain, which is now a 301 redirect to the sign-in domain. To make that clear - **Google is displaying the origin domain in SERPs, instead of displaying the destination domain. ** The question is - how do we get this popular product's login page to rank higher than the product page for "login" / "sign in" queries? I'm not even sure where we should point links to at this point - the actual sign in domain or the origin domain? I have the redirect chains and domain authority for all of the pages involved, including a few of our major competitors (who follow the same login format), and will be happy to share it privately with a Moz expert. I'd prefer not to make any more information publicly available, so please reach out via private message if you think you can help.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | leosaraceni0 -
Hreflang Sitemap
Hi all, Have you ever created an hreflang sitemap using in-house resources or a third-party company for a group of over 70 sites, each with hundreds of pages and all with localised URLs? If so, would you mind sharing how you did it, or the contact details of the company you used? In this specific case there is nothing in the URL or code that I can use to group the alternatives automatically. Thanks, Carlos
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Carlos-R0 -
Hreflang or not, or something else?
I'm working on a site that has 10 languages served from centrally located core files in Magento. So each language has its own TLD with localised content served from SQL. GWT has also had the preferred country set for each domain. The problem is that each and every domain is indexed in each of the local Google indexes. In DE Google the FR homepage is ranking higher for the brand keyword. I kind of think I am wasting my time with hreflang but would like some advice whether this is an option or clues how I can handle this situation best.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MickEdwards0 -
Add or not add "nofollow" to duplicate internal links?
Hello everyone. I have searched on these forums for an answer to my concerns, and despite I found many discussions and questions about applying or not applying "nofollow" to internal links, I couldn't find an answer specific to my particular scenarios. Here is my first scenario: I have an e-commerce site selling digital sheet music, and on my category pages our products are shown typically with the following format: PRODUCT TITLE link that takes to product page Short description text "more info" link that takes to the same product page again As you may notice, the "more info" link takes at the very same page of the PRODUCT TITLE link. So, my question is: is there any benefit to "nofollow" the "more info" link to tell SEs to "ignore" that link? Or should I leave the way it is and let the SE figure it out? My biggest concern by leaving the "nofollow" out is that the "more info" generic and repetitive anchor text could dilute or "compete" with the keyword content of the PRODUCT TITLE anchor text.... but maybe that doesn't really matter! Here a typical category page from my site; http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html My second scenario: on our product pages, we have several different links that take to the very same "preview page" of the product we sell. Each link has a different anchor text, and some other links are just images, all taking to the same page. Here are the anchor texts or ALT text of such same links: "Download Free Sample" (text link) "Cover of the [product title]" (ALT image text) "Look inside this title" (ALT image text) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) "This item contains one high quality PDF sheet music file ready to download and print." (ALT image text) "PDF" (text link) "[product title] PDF file" (ALT image text) So, I have 7 links on the same product page taking the user to the same "product preview page" which is, by the way, canonicalized to the "main" product page we are talking about. Here is an example of product page on my site: http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html My instinct is to tell SEs to take into account just the links with the "[product title] PDF file" anchor text, and then add a "nofollow" to the other links... but may that hurting in some way? Is that irrelevant? Doesn't matter? How should I move? Just ignore this issue and let the SEs figure it out? Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Question about "launching to G" a new site with 500000 pages
Hey experts, how you doing? Hope everything is ok! I'm about to launch a new website, the code is almost done. Totally fresh new domain. The site will have like 500000 pages, fully internal optimized of course. I got my taticts to make G "travel" over my site to get things indexed. The problem is: to release it in "giant mode" or release it "thin" and increase the pages over the time? What do you recomend? Release the big G at once and let them find the 500k pages (do they think this can be a SPAM or something like that)? Or release like 1k/2k per day? Anybody know any good aproach to improve my chances of success here? Any word will be apreciated. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | azaiats20