Your mistake is that you probably used relative URLs and not absolute ones (these are the ones like: http://www.domain.com/)

So, the hreflang in sitemaps.xml for your home page should be this (please note that I put /it/ but you should put the real italian version home page, and that is valid for all URLs:

<url><loc>http://www.domain.com/</loc></url>

As for your second question - mixing matching and not matching URLs in the hreflang annotations - I would not suggest it.

If they are contextual links, then you should not have any problem and can maintain them as they are.

No need "to hide" them to Google.

Yes, your own second guess is the correct one.

The hreflang in URL based, not domain base, so you have to specify it for every single URL that needs it.

Hi Pieter,

can you answer to this question?

I checked you .nl website with flang by Dejan SEO, and it is not showing me any hreflang annotation... I check directly looked into the code and confirmed that was not a Flang mistake.

So... are you using hreflang in your sitemaps.xml file?

I see that you already decided to stick with the .com domain.

It's fine, albeit a conservative choice, even though I would have started considering more seriously the idea of migrating to a .com.au domain name if - as you say - you're struggling vs those ccTlds domains, which outrank you even if objective factors (link profile, DA, PA) are better in your case.

I say it because of the lift effect a ccTld may mean: given parity of pondered factor, one ranking signal improved can provide you a big positive change.

However, I agree with you that migrating your domain may be a risk because of all the things that can go wrong during a migration.

Therefore, look at others geotargeting signals. For instance, look at from where your backlinks are coming. You say you have clients from all over the world, therefore I suspect that you target the global market also when creating the link profile of your site, and considered less important earning links from local websites or sites targeting your region.

Maybe you should start targeting more also those sites, so to give a clear geotargeting sitgnal to Google.

Obviously, this is a generic suggestion, as I don't know that much about your site and niche, but remember: international SEO is not just about domain terminations and geo-targeting in Search Console, but also many others signals, being the origin of inbound links one of the most relevant ones.

Using the hard coded hreflang or the sitemap option is indifferent.

Regarding why Google is caching the .be flemish version of your website, instead of the .nl one, I sincerely have no answer to give you, but - with the few information I have about it right now - what I would look is at the CMS you are using, in the case you have a centralized CMS that then distributes the content along the domains.

Your case is weird, because that something I usually experience with hacked sites.

I put this in discussion, and ask others to give their answer.

Actually you may think in building a Global page on Facebook. As you can read in the page I linked, with Global Pages:

Each brand's Global Pages structure will include local Pages for specific markets (single- or multi-country regions) and a default Page for all other markets. More details on this new framework:

• One global brand identity. Users from all countries will see the same Page name (translated into their local language), fan count, and People Talking About This (PTAT).
• One URL. Brands can promote a single URL in all off-Facebook campaigns, and users will be automatically directed to the best version of the Page for them.
• Global insights. Admins of the main Page will see insights for all global users in one easy-to-view dashboard.

The problem is that the requirement really are for strong global brands, as you can see in detail in this post.

Honestly, I looked a lot into the Facebook Business pages and I was not able to see an explicit link for creating a global page. So, I consider right what some experts say that you have to contact Facebook directly via email.

However, if your brand is global, but not with such a big budget so to afford a Global Brand Page, then the only solution is creating as many regional Brand pages as you need.

This is very easy. Just create a page normally, but then indicate in the creation process the region your Page targets for each regional pages.

It's a cultural thing. I'm that province of Italy people talk or Italian or German, so if you want to target both with your multilingual site you must tell it to Google with hreflang, even if it is not listed in the ISO chart.

you do the same for targeting Spanish speaking people in the usa, for instance.

Likes are not a ranking factor :D... so thinking they are the reason your UK Facebook page is outranking the German one in google.de is not a correct assumption.

I would look to more classic reason, as the backlinks your UK Facebook page may have and the DE one not.

Try to build links pointing to your German FB page from German webistes. This should be enough for making understand Google to present your DE FB page to German users instead of the UK one.

Finally, the hreflang annotations (presence or not) do not have any influence of how your Facebook pages rank or not.

You can think about presenting the "related products" or the "related recipees" or the "most popular recipees" (if you have a user rating system up, so that users of the site can upvote a recipe or another) as normally blogs do with "related posts".

I would present them below the product description and below the recipe, depending on the case.

I would not hide them behind a tab, because of that alert Tim is writing about in his comment (which, if it is really so - someone should test it - could be an interesting option for hiding content that you don't want Google to consider for ranking reasons).

Yes, it exists (it is Alto Agide/South Tirol), and it's the same case of Netherlands (fr-NL and de-NL) or Switzerland (it-CH, fr-CH and de-CH)