Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Gianluca,

Thanks for your response. The HREFlang tags are a part of the sitemaps.xml. Do you think it might be a better idea to insert the HREFlangs on each page? Any idea why Google might cache another domain for this website?

Pieter

Hi Andy,

Thank for your response. I've checked the HREFlang tags and to me it looks like everything is inserted correctly. The problem is that google keeps on indexing the cache of the .be domain for the .nl domain. Any idea why Google might do this (indexing the .be domain as the .nl domain?)

Thanks

Pieter

We have problems with the google cache version of different domains.
For the “.nl” domain we have an “.be” cache..
Enter “cache:www.dmlights.nl” in your browser to see this result.

Following points are already adapted:

• Sitemap contains hreflang tag
• Sitemap is moved to the location www.dmlights.nl/sitemap.xml
• We checked the DNS configuration
• Changed the Content language in de response header to : Content-Language: nl-NL
• Removed the cache with webmastertools
• Resolved serverrequest errors.

Can anyone provide a solution to fix this problem?

Thanks,

Pieter

David, what i'm trying to reach is this:

On the desktop page I add this between my

<linkrel="alternate"media="only screen="" and="" (max-width:="" 640px)" href="http://m.example.com/page-1"></linkrel="alternate"media="only>

On the mobile page I add this between my

<link< span="">rel="canonical"href="http://www.example.com/page-1"></link<>

In this way i'm saying to search engines that for this desktop URL an alternate mobile URL is available. The desktop URL is the one that will get in to the search results ( based on the canonical on the mobile URL) and users will be served the desktop or mobile page depending on the device they're using ("media="only screen and (max-width: 640px)". In this way duplicate issues are countered.

Besides this I have multiple copies of the my desktop URL. Thes copies get the right canonical to the source page. But when I want to add the rel=alternate to my source, they also are added to my copies of the desktop URL. (The system in which i'm working doesn't allow me to do otherwise)

I made a scheme of this (see image). I'm concerned that the rel=alternate on the desktop's copy URL's may cause problems to achieve the above.

@Robert: Thanks for the input, clear to me. I will test it!

EG0VJnX.png?1?9008

Thanks a lot for the answer! To answer yours; If we want to insert a rel=alternate (or any tag) on the source page it's automatically added in it's copies. We can work around it but asks a lot of work and budget. Don't ask me why/how or the details, the only thing I know for sure is that it wasn't build for SEO ;).

Pieter

Sorry wrong interpretation of your question. Have you excluded the site search pages using robots.txt.? If not this might be the reason why you've that many pages indexed.

Anyway this discussion might give you more answers:

Are you using just one sitemap or multiple?

I have a mobile site (m.example.com) and a desktop site (example.com). I want search engines to know that for every desktop page there is a mobile equivalent. To do this I insert a rel=alternate on the desktop pages to the mobile equivalent. On the mobile pages I insert a rel=canonical to it's equivalent desktop page. So far so good BUT:

Almost every desktop page has 4 or 5 copies (duplicate content). I get rid of this issue by using the rel=canonical to the source page. Still no problem here.

But what happens if I insert a rel=alternate to the mobile equivalent on every copy of the source page? I know it sounds stupid but the system doesn't allow me to insert a rel=alternate on just one page. It's all or nothing!

My question:

Does Google ignore the rel=alternate on the duplicate pages but keeps understanding the link between the desktop source page  & mobile page  ? Or should I avoid this scenario?

Many Thanks

Pieter