:Pointing hreflang to a different domain

[Bee159]

Hi all,

Let's say I have two websites: www.mywebsite.com and www.mywebsite.de - they share a lot of content but the main categories and URLs are almost always different.

Am I right in saying I can't just set the hreflang tag on every page of www.mywebsite.com to read:

rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de' />

That just won't do anything, right?

Am I also right in saying that the only way to use hreflang properly across two domains is to have a customer hreflang tag on every page that has identical content translated into German?

So for this page: www.mywebsite.com/page.html my hreflang tag for the german users would be:

<link < span="">rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http://mywebsite.de/page.html' /></link <>

Thanks for your time.

[NickJasuja]

Hreflang is used at a page level, not at a site level. So no, you should not just set the hreflang tag on every page of www.mywebsite.com to read:

So yes, if the German translation of the page www.mywebsite.com/page.html is available at www.mywebsite.de/page.html then you must do 2 things:

1. On www.mywebsite.com/page.html  use  <link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http: mywebsite.de="" page.html'="">and <link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http: mywebsite.com="" page.html'=""></link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http:></link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http:>

2. On www.mywebsite.de/page.html  <link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http: mywebsite.com="" page.html'="">and <link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http: mywebsite.de="" page.html'=""> </link rel='alternate' hreflang='de' href='http:></link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='http:>

What this means is that the English page should link to itself and to all other language variants. And there should be "return tags", i.e. each of the language variations should link to themselves and to all other language variants.