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We are currently handling search for a global brand www.example.com/ which has presence in many countries worldwide. To help Google understand that there is an alternate version of the website available in another language, we have used hreflang tags.

These hreflang tags are implemented only via the XML sitemap across all geo-locations.

Under the “Search Analytics -> International Targeting” section, in Google Search Console, for the Malaysian website (www.example.com/my/), there are a number of “no-return tags (sitemaps)” errors arising.

For example, for India as a geo-location, there is one ‘en-IN’ – no return tags (sitemaps) errors listed. The error is listed below:

Originating URL - www.example.com/my/xyz/

Alternate URL - www.example.com/in/xyz/

When the XML sitemap for the URL – www.example.com/in/ was checked for the hreflang tags, it was noticed that the implementation of hreflang tags for the URL – www.example.com/in/xyz/ was perfectly fine and it was providing a return tag to the URL – www.example.com/my/xyz/. After the code level verification, it was identified that the implementation of hreflang tags was perfectly fine via the XML sitemap.

Even though at the code level it was verified that the implementation is fine, the error still persists in Google Search Console.

Kindly suggest a solution to this situation, and also advise the effects of these errors on search engine performance

We are currently handling search for a global brand www.example.com which has presence in many countries worldwide. To help Google understand that there is an alternate version of the website available in another language, we have used “hreflang” tags. Also, there is a mother website (www.example.com/global) which is given the attribution of “x-default” in the “hreflang” tag. For Malaysia as a geolocation, the mother website is ranking instead of the local website (www.example.com/my) for majority of the products.

The code used for “hreflang” tag execution, on a product page, being:

These “hreflang” tags are also present in the XML sitemap of the website, mentioning them below:

<loc>http://www.example.com/my/product_name</loc>

<lastmod>2017-06-20</lastmod>

Is this implementation of “hreflang” tags fine? As this implementation is true across all geo-locations, but the mother website is out-ranking me only in the Malaysia market.

If the implementation is correct, what could be other reasons for the same ranking issue, as all other SEO elements have been thoroughly verified and they seem fine.

1. Yes, Site A republishes content from Site B on a daily basis as Site A has an exclusive partnership with Site B for republication (with site B being the parent publisher). To address content duplication errors we use the original-source tag to point towards the articles present on site B.

2. Yes, it performed well a couple of months ago until the non-critical errors started building up recently. One of them being "Use of deprecated tags or attributes". Also, as mentioned previously, AMP pages site A has non-critical errors and AMP pages from site B have critical as well as non-critical errors.

3. Yes.

4. Yes. Site A has about 15,000+ Indexed AMP pages, 4000+ Critical AMP Errors and 22,000+ non-critical AMP errors.

Consider site A which is a news publishing site that has valid AMP pages with non-critical AMP pages (as notified within Search Console). Also, Site A publishes news articles from site B (its partner site) and posts it on site A which have AMP pages too but most of them are not valid AMP pages with critical AMP errors.

For brand terms like Economic Times, it does show a top stories carousel for all articles published by Economic Times, however it doesn't look the same for site A (inspite of it having valid AMP pages).

Image link: http://tinypic.com/r/219bh9j/9

Now that there are valid AMP pages from site A and invalid AMP pages from site B on site A, there have been instances wherein a news article from site A features on the top stories carousel on Desktop for a certain query whereas it doesn't feature on the mobile SERPs in spite of the page being a valid AMP page. For example, as mentioned in the screenshot below: Business Today ranks on the Top Stories carousel for a term like “jio news” on Desktop, but on Mobile although the page is a valid AMP page, it doesn’t show as an AMP page within the Top Stories Carousel.

Image Link: http://tinypic.com/r/11sc8j6/9

There have been some cases where although the page is featured on the top carousel on desktop, the same article doesn't show up on the mobile version for the same query on the Top Stories Carousel.

What could be the reason behind this? Also, would it be necessary to solve both critical and non-critical errors on site A (including those published from site B on site A)?

Hey Kate!

Thanks for your reply, however, if even I add Hindi in the browser preference language, the URL when seen in GSC are just characters. And yes, the website is performing well, the ranks and traffic are doing well, however, for analysis purposes, so as to understand which pages are to be targeted, it becomes a humongous task since will have to open each and every URL in GSC and understand the statistics. Hence wanted to understand how can we get the Hindi URLs in Hindi Characters in GSC data, and not in ASCII Characters!

Hi,

We have a regional language sub-domain, which has the URI in the regional language characters (Hindi). While looking at the Search Analytics data in GSC, we get all the URLs in ASCII format. To resolve this issue, we even encoded the characters in UTF-8, by adding the following in the of the page:

However, we are still getting illegible URLs in search console. It would be really great if someone could help me out with this issue.

Thanks!

I have been sourcing content from a news publisher who is my partner for publishing content online. My website deals with sourcing content from a couple of websites. I did use a canonical tag pointing towards the respective syndicated source but I have not seen traffic for those articles.

I did some research and found out that Google does have a tag for news publishers which is the "original-source" tag which helps news publishers to give proper credit for their work. Here's a link to the official word by Google" https://news.googleblog.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html

Although Google has officially stated that the "syndication-source" tag has been replaced by the "canonical" tag. However, there is no mention about the "original-source" tag.
Can I still use the "original-source" tag to syndicate content from my partner site instead of the "canonical" tag?

P.S.: The reason why I am not convinced with the use of the canonical tag is because:
1. As per what Google says, duplicate content won't harm my website unless it is spam. (And since we are rightfully content from our partner'website and showcasing it to a larger audience by hosting it on our website as well, we are thereby not indulging in any unethical practices)

2. The canonical tag could possibly hamper my crawl bandwidth issues as it would essentially need the crawler to crawl the whole page to figure out that the canonical is present, post which any possible valuation that my site could have garnered gets lost.3. Moreover, since I am from the news, media and publication industry, content republication is a widely accepted practice and in such cases simply including a link to the original source of the article or using the original source tag should suffice,

That being mentioned, I do not want to go ahead without taking a second opinion about this. Kindly help me to resolve this issue.

Hello Webmasters,

My site has incurred a sudden dip in rankings across sections. We conducted an analysis and have observed the following two major issues:

• Unnatural Links Penalty: Our site was issued an Unnatural Links Penalty on May 23.

Basically, we have both 'http' and 'https' versions of our website registered on Webmaster tools. Initially, the warning showed up on the 'http' version and thus we started a cleanup by extracting the linking domains and have also filed a reconsideration request once all the spammy domains were removed and rightly disavowed.

Recently, we got another manual action warning on the 'https' version regarding the unnatural links. So we have started with the cleanup activity right away. While analyzing this issue, we came across another major problem regarding the two versions which is our next concern and is mentioned below.

• https Canonical Issue: For more insights, we went through our site’s content and found that our website is following the below pattern

Our 'http' version of the webpages get 301 redirected to the 'https' version. This 'https' version again has a canonical pointing to the 'http' version thus creating a loop.

To conclude, I request your valuable learnings and thoughts on the following:

• Which of these issues are likely to have affected our website’s ranking
• Which version is likely to be preferred by Google (https or http) in our case

In order to get the AMP version of my website show up on the SERP, is it a complusory factor that my website needs to support HTTPs.