Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?

[john_marketade]

Hello,

I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article).  My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit.  One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags.  My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else?  Any other thoughts are appreciated.  Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly.

Thanks!Lauryn

[gfiorelli1]

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.

[john_marketade]

Thank you so much.

Does it suffice if we put this code in the header across the site, or does each unique url need to have a specialized url in the code.

Ex:

Is the following good for the entire site:

Vs.

AND

AND

Etc...up to 100+ pages....

[gfiorelli1]

First of all remember that the hreflang annotation is not necessarily needed in every page.
Said that, it really depends on your devs facilities what method to use, if in-code or using the sitemaps.

Both work fine, and what you should not do is using both at the same time, because the possibility of creating contradictory hreflang annotations increases.

[MattAntonino]

It depends on the setup of your site, to be honest.

If you have a Wordpress, Joomla, etc. with really easy access header sections that you can put the code in once and it's done forevermore no matter what pages are added, that's the simplest way.

If your dev can script it to add to each page through the sitemap, that's also a one & done way.

The only thing you really don't want to do is have to add a hreflang tag to every new page you add to the site. As long as you can avoid that, you should be right. We had a client add it to their sitemap but the sitemap wasn't auto-generating the tag so each time they updated they had to re-implement the tags. That was a frustrating time ... now we've got it automatically updating so it's much easier to maintain.

[john4math]

I think all the implementations work just about the same.  We chose to do it in our sitemaps because that was the easiest for our developer to implement.  You should choose one or the other, there's no need to do multiple implementations.