Are my hreflang and canonical link tags set correctly?
-
Currently we have a website in english but over time we will roll out parts of the whole site in different languages for different countries which will also result in country specific English versions of the website.
The goal is that Google shows the country specific version of a page in a native language or English if available or falls back to the default English version of the same page otherwise.
I listed below how we plan to use hreflang and canonical link tags to achieve this and was hoping to get some feedback from the Moz community if this will work as expected.
(1) A page (www.mysite.com/page1) exists only in English as default. Users should be able to find it in every country unless there is an English version specifically for this country. We would use the following tags:
(2) A page exists in English (www.mysite.com/id/en/page2) and Bahasa (www.mysite.com/id/id/page2) for a specific country (Indonesia in this case). Users in Indonesia searching in English should find the country specific English page. Indonesians searching in Bahasa should find the Bahasa version of that page. We would use the following tags on the English version:
and therefor the following tags on the Bahasa version:
In this case there wouldn't be a default English version available for the page.
(3) If a page exists in English global, English for Indonesians and Bahasa for Indonesians we would use:
If www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 and www.mysite.com/page3 are very similar we would risk google picking the page they want to rank for an english keyword searched in Indonesia, correct?
(4) If a page in (1) and (2) can be reached with a different URL, we would only use a canonical and don't specify any hreflang tags e.g.:
www.mysite.com/en/other-url-to-page1
or
www.mysite.com/id/en/other-url-to-page2-english-indonesia(5) If a page that exists as global English page becomes available in English for a specific country as e.g. www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 we would use the following tags:
and also add one more hreflang to www.mysite.com/page1:
The assumption here is that Google would rank the localized page instead of the global page after crawling our site again. But since this will be a new page, are we going to lose traffic because www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 won't rank as well in the beginning (e.g. no offsite optimization)?
-
You did not realy ask a question... so no resonses.
But we are 6 months ahead. so you must have tested it!? What did you find? Did it work?
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
-
Hreflang on non 1:1 websites
Hi. I have a client with international websites targeting several different countries. Currently, the US (.com) website outranks the country-specific domain when conducting a search within that country (i.e. US outranks the UK website in the UK). This sounds like a classic case for hrelang. However, the websites are largely not 1:1. They offer different content with a different design and a different URL structure. Each country is on a country-specific domain (.com, .co.uk, .com.au, etc.). As well, the country-specific domains have lower domain authority than the US/.com website - fewer links, lower quality content, poorer UX, etc. Would hreflang still help in this scenario if we were to map it the closest possible matching page? Do the websites not sharing content 1:1 add any risks? The client is worried the US/.com website will lose ranking in the country but the country-specific domain won't gain that ranking. Thanks for any help or examples you can offer!
International SEO | | Matthew_Edgar0 -
When should hreflang be deployed in this situation; now or later ?
Hi I have a question in regard to point 1 in Gianluca Fiorelli first comment on Aleyda Solis old but great international targeting article in regard to hreflang: https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool it would obvs be amazing if either Gianlucca or Aleyda can answer but if anyone else feels they can do so confidently then that would be great too 🙂 I'm advising someone in similar situation as that (their main brand is USA based on a .com showing up in UK searches too) and they have launched .co.uk sites (without any seo) to target UK brand searches, so obviously the .com is still dominating UK serps for brand, and the .co.uk is ranking on page 4 on average for a brand search. **BUT **before I tell them to roll out hreflang shouldn't they build up some authority etc first for their new country specific (.co.uk) site ? since they are very new and have no authority or even basic SEO and don't rank higher than page 4 for brand searches (the .com is in no1 in both usa and uk). I know hreflang needs to be used correctly here but im not sure when it should be, now or later (after authority has built up for the new uk focused sites) ? In other words I take it deploying the hreflang correctly wont simply cause these home pages to swap positions for brand search in uk (or will it) ? Im worried deploying it immediately could actually destroy the brands current page 1 serps for brand term (since will remove the .com page from the uk serp). Hence i take it its best to build up the new .co.uk sites seo/authority etc first and at least get that sites brand ranking moving up the listings before deploying hreflang on the .com, to then hopefully remove the .com listing in place of the .co.uk for brand ? OR does Gianlucca point in his comment suggest that correct hreflang usage on both sites should swap the high authority .com no1 position with the low authority .co.uk for a brand search ? Many Thanks Dan
International SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Hreflang tags and canonical tags - might be causing indexing and duplicate content issues
Hi, Let's say I have a site located at https://www.example.com, and also have subdirectories setup for different languages. For example: https://www.example.com/es_ES/ https://www.example.com/fr_FR/ https://www.example.com/it_IT/ My Spanish version currently has the following hreflang tags and canonical tag implemented: My robots.txt file is blocking all of my language subdirectories. For example: User-agent:* Disallow: /es_ES/ Disallow: /fr_FR/ Disallow: /it_IT/ This setup doesn't seem right. I don't think I should be blocking the language-specific subdirectories via robots.txt What are your thoughts? Does my hreflang tag and canonical tag implementation look correct to you? Should I be doing this differently? I would greatly appreciate your feedback and/or suggestions.
International SEO | | Avid_Demand0 -
Hreflang for selected pages?
My English site example.com has 1300 Pages I have launched a Russian transasation of the site example.ru This site has only 20 pages so far. Doubt: I need to set hreflang for all 1300 pages or only for 20 Pages of example.com that are converted to russian? Due to the limitations of the plugins avaialable I need to MANUALLY set hreflang for all 1300 pages of example.com Please guide
International SEO | | Janki990 -
Will hreflang with a language and region allow Google to show the page to all users of that language regardless of region?
I'm launching translations on a website with the first translation being Brazilian Portuguese. If I use the following hreflang: If a user is outside of Brazil and has their browser language set to just Portuguese (Not Portuguese (Brazil)) will Google still serve them the Portuguese version of my pages in search results?
International SEO | | Brando160 -
Hreflang hindering performance?
I want to add hreflang on my website but the dev guys think it will hinder performance? Any thoughts/experience with this one way or the other? Thanks!
International SEO | | theLotter0 -
Multi-lingual Site (Tags & XML SiteMap Question)
We have two sites that target users in two different countries in different languages in the following manner: Site 1 es.site1.com - Spanish version Site 2 site2.com/francais/.............. Navigation and content are translated into the foreign language from English What is the best way to let Google know about these multi-lingual pages: A. Add the rel="alternate" and hreflang= in the source code for the hunders of pages we have. B. Or is there a tool we can use to crawl and create XML site maps for different language pages. What do we need to do in the XML site map so that Google know that sitemap1.xml for example relates to Spanish as an example many thanks
International SEO | | CeeC-Blogger0 -
Alexa Rank and Linking from Article sites.
We are creating unique content and submitting our articles to article sites. I have some questions about the best way to go about this. 1. We are being very careful to create unique content for each submission - so we are not submitting the same article to multiple sites. Each submission is unique, so 1 article per 1 article directory. 2. When I did my research about these article sites at Alexa.com, I noticed that a lot of the article sites are ranking very well globally, but that a lot of them are #1 in Alexa for India. They are still ranked for other countries with very top ranking, for example, they may 9,000 Alexa rank in India and then 18,000 in the U.S. which is still very high. 3. We are trying to reach U.S. customers mostly, so I am wondering if we are still getting value by linking to these sites who have global reach (even though they are ranked best for India). I would think that this is very beneficial still, but I didn't want to get the wrong kind of traffic by getting links from sites that are primarily getting their traffic from India, even though they are also getting tons of traffic from the U.S. - I am assuming this is OK because a 18,000 or 19,000 Alexa Rank in the U.S. is still excellent and I will benefit by this. But I wanted to be sure. Feedback?
International SEO | | applesofgold0