Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How does link juice flow through hreflang?
-
We want to use the hreflang tag on our site (direct users searching for the Spanish version of spanishdict.com to spanishdict.com/traductor). Before doing so, we were wondering how link juice flows through hreflang? Any insight or resources on this would be very helpful. Thanks!
-
Thanks for this helpful response, Dirk! Yep, you understood our question correctly. Looks like we may not be able to add an hreflang tag on our /traductor page then. If there's any way around this please let us know!
-
The answer by Dimitri is wrong! (Sorry Dimitri).
The hreflang's href doesn't pass any link equity (use this definition, not link juice, please :-)).
It is a rel="alternate" and doesn't have any connection with things like 301s.
-
Hreflang is reciprocal - so if page A indicates page B as equivalent - page B has to declare page A as equivalent.
If I understand your question well - you want to have 2 English pages with a hreflang pointing to the same Spanish page. This is not possible.
Dirk
-
Hi Dirk -- Thanks for your helpful response! One more question, can we have an hreflang tag from both our homepage (www.spanishdict.com) and another page (www.spanishdict.com/translation) to the Spanish version of the site (www.spanishdict.com/traductor)?
-
Ok, that's what I thought. I guess I just didn't explain properly in my first answer
-
In that case it will reinforce the domain (like any external link to any page on the domain).
It's just that a link to domain.com/es/page will not count as a link to domain.com/en/page even when they are "linked" via the hreflang tag. Idem where the domains are different. ex domain.es/page & domain.co.uk/page - a link to .es page will not count for the .co.uk page (and domain) even when they are connected via the hreflang.
Dirk
-
Hi. Well, they do not consolidate, that's for sure. However, I have a question then: so, if, let's say i have a to site.com/ and site.com/es/ for Spain and then somebody links to site.com/es/, wouldn't this increase DA of the whole domain, which is site.com?
-
Not sure if what Dmitrii is stating is correct.
If you check the comments here https://www.distilled.net/blog/distilled/distilledlive-london-a-few-thoughts-on-hreflang/ they state:
" hreflang anotations do not consolidate link equity." (source: Maile Ohye (Google's Developer Programs Tech Lead) at SES London) "Hreflang was not designed to consolidate link authority" (source John Mu - chat with David Sottimano)Also on Moz - Gianluca seems to be convinced of the same - https://moz.com/community/q/will-website-with-tag-hreflang-pass-link-juice-to-other-country-language-version-of-website -
Dirk
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
-
Page Rank Flow
I wonder if someone can help me understand clearly page rank flow. If we have a website with a Home page, Services, About and Contact as a very basic website and the page rank will flow to each of those pages from the Home page (i'm not including internal linking between pages or anchor text from the home page content - this is a question purely about home page flow via the main navigation). If the Services page had 3 drop down pages. Would the home page rank also flow to each of these or is it going to the Services page which then distributes it to the three drop down. So instead of Home page rank flowing to 3 pages 33% each - it is flowing to 6 pages 16.6% each. Or is it flowing to 3 pages - 33.3% then the Services pages get a third of 33.3% ->10.1% I know this is simplifying it all a great deal- but it is the basic concept I am trying to grasp on this simple example. Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Duplicate titles from hreflang variations
Hi, I am working on a large global site which has around 9 different language variations. We have setup the hreflang tags and referenced the corresponding content as follows: (We have not implemented a version X-default reference, as we felt it was not necessary) Using DeepCrawl and Search Console, we can see that these language variations are causing duplicate title issues. Many of them. My assumption was that the hreflang would have alleviated this issue and informed Google what is going on, however i wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this kind of thing before. It would be good to understand what the best practice approach is to deal with the problem. Is it even an issue at all, or just the tools being over-sensitive? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Broken canonical link errors
Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
Technical SEO | | GhillC
Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
G1 -
Can I use a 301 redirect to pass 'back link' juice to a different domain?
Hi, I have a backlink from a high DA/PA Government Website pointing to www.domainA.com which I own and can setup 301 redirects on if necessary. However my www.domainA.com is not used and has no active website (but has hosting available which can 301 redirect). www.domainA.com is also contextually irrelevant to the backlink. I want the Government Website link to go to www.domainB.com - which is both the relevant site and which also should be benefiting from from the seo juice from the backlink. So far I have had no luck to get the Government Website's administrators to change the URL on the link to point to www.domainB.com. Q1: If i use a 301 redirect on www.domainA.com to redirect to www.domainB.com will most of the backlink's SEO juice still be passed on to www.domainB.com? Q2: If the answer to the above is yes - would there be benefit to taking this a step further and redirect www.domainA.com to a deeper directory on www.domianB.com which is even more relevant?
Technical SEO | | DGAU
ie. redirect www.domainA.com to www.domainB.com/categoryB - passing the link juice deeper.0 -
How can I stop a tracking link from being indexed while still passing link equity?
I have a marketing campaign landing page and it uses a tracking URL to track clicks. The tracking links look something like this: http://this-is-the-origin-url.com/clkn/http/destination-url.com/ The problem is that Google is indexing these links as pages in the SERPs. Of course when they get indexed and then clicked, they show a 400 error because the /clkn/ link doesn't represent an actual page with content on it. The tracking link is set up to instantly 301 redirect to http://destination-url.com. Right now my dev team has blocked these links from crawlers by adding Disallow: /clkn/ in the robots.txt file, however, this blocks the flow of link equity to the destination page. How can I stop these links from being indexed without blocking the flow of link equity to the destination URL?
Technical SEO | | UnbounceVan0 -
Dofollow and Nofollow links
What is the difference between dofollow and nofollow links? I know that some sites/blogs only let you post nofollow links. In such a case how do I know if a comment I posted on a certain site will be a nofollow or dofollow? How about big traffic sites such as Huff Post. Do they only allow nofollow links?
Technical SEO | | greenfoxone0 -
International Site Links In Footer
We have several international sites and we have them linked in the footer of our main .com site . Should we add "nofollow" to these links? Our concern is that Google could see these sites as a network?
Technical SEO | | EwanFisher0 -
How to find links to 404 pages?
I know that I used to be able to do this, but I can't seem to remember. One of the sites I am working on has had a lot of pages moving around lately. I am sure some links got lost in the fray that I would like to recover, what is the easiest way to see links going to a domain that are pointing to 404 pages?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0