Will hreflang indication help single language site?
-
I have read a few articles that say indicating a language per webpage with hreflang really only helps sites that use multiple languages.
Although my site is only in English, I see that it is ranking for a few foreign language keywords in Google Search Console (not sure exact traffic but roughly 15% of visitors from Search are non English preferred).
My thought is that indicating language will help my single-language site because it will weed out the non-english speakers who are probably bouncing from the site. Overall I am thinking it might improve the quality of my search traffic.
Do you think my logic is sound, or is adding hreflang not beneficial to my site?
All feedback welcomed. Thanks!
-
Are there any major cons to include the hreflang attribute if there isn't a translated version? My site has some pages that are translated, which we include proper hreflang tags, but some pages that do not currently have a translated page. It sounds like it would take more work to remove the tags on those pages without a translated version than to keep it. Will this cause major issues with Google?
-
Thanks for the response, Gianluca. When you point out that rel=alternate is used, that does make it clearer that this is a tag used for a pair of URLs. That makes sense that this feature probably wasn't built to use for my scenario.
So I am guessing, in my situation I can't really inform Google to only target people who speak a certain language. I kind of just have to leave it up to Google to decipher. Even if I set the target country in Search Console to the US, this would exclude other English-speaking countries who are still in my target audience, which includes global English speakers (i.e. Singapore).
Is there anything we haven't brought up that you would recommend for my situation?
-
Ups, then im sorry.
I've never intended to give false information. I had incorrect information.Thanks for correcting me.
GR -
Here the answers:
-
the hreflang tag doesn't slow down websites performance. it makes have an incidence only in the case you have hundreds of hreflang markups in the html code, so that in t case it is better to use the sitemap.xml implementation.
-
you site is only in English, hence you can't use the hreflang, because it is an "alternate", therefore it always needs a pair (eg: "e-US". using it only in self-referential way (as sometimes we do with rel "canonical" is wrong and Google will present it as a mistake and not consider it
-
if you really want to target only the US public, then you must geotarget the domain in Search Console, going to its "International" section and selecting United States as the country targeted by the site.
-
-
You are is wrong and misleadin, sorry.
The he is never redundant and an English site could also be targeting another country than the USA.
You're correct saying it's not useful in this case, but not for the reason you give
-
Thanks for the response Gaston!
I am aware this will not help my page rankings. My thought is that it will improve the quality of my site's search traffic as explained in my original post.
Hmm.. do you really think adding "" to my html will slow down load speed? If that is the case, you are saying adding one link to your page will slow down the load time. I just don't think adding this small piece of code will have a significant effect on page speed.
If I check the International Targeting tab in Search Console, it says no hreflang tags being used, so I'm not sure how redundant this would be. I know Google can pick up languages, but I think of adding hreflang tags as insurance that the right audience will be reached.
I like your example about my mom (haha) and I would like to expand on it. If you were looking for "a woman" and came across my mother, you would be able to read the sign and be satisfied your search came to an end. However, if a non-english speaker was searching for "a woman" and came across my mother, although she has the features of a woman, s/he may be confused by the sign with foreign characters and leave immediately (this is bounce rate IRL).
God (AKA Google) would then take note that 50% of the people searching for a woman, that visited my mother, left confused. So s/he would stop leading people in search of "a woman" to my mother.
Does this depiction change your opinion on my thoughts at all?
-
Hi Jonathan,
Technically speaking, adding the hreflang sentence will not help your SERPs. Because it's redundant.
Also, I'd advise you to not add it. The reason is simple, the more lines of code, the slower the page is. And there is a common sense that google does not like redundant code.
Think it by yourself, in which way will it help you, that knowing that an english site, having a signal expressing that their language is english? Its like your mom would have a sign with ''I am a woman''
Hope it helps.
GR
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
-
No Redirects In Place After Transfer To New Site With Same Domain :(
Hi Moz Folks, I'm new here and am loving all the information! Can't wait to dig in more. Folks, I have a situation and would love to hear more about your experiences here and what advice you all have to give. I have a client whose SEO I helped out with about 4-5 years ago. It went well and they had historically been ranking on pages 1-2 for the majority of their targeted keywords. Client and I lost touch over the years, but now we are in process of working together again. What I learned today is that my client redesigned the entire old site without placing any redirects and entirely creating new URL structures (I already hear the gasps of air of those reading this). Long story short - you guessed it - rankings/traffic has dropped and the old pages have fallen out of index. Considering that I was hired to re-do and re-audit the SEO of the site and also considering that the domain had a relative decent standing in the rankings in the past, I'm wondering what exactly I should do of the following options (or please do suggest other options): 1. We have the ability to completely revert back to the old site with all the old keywords and and search optimized URLs. The new site was launched just 2 weeks ago and the owner has said that he is willing to revert back to the old site while we audit the new site and get all of the proper optimizations in place. This would be a great option if it will help us because at least we can get a site up that we know ranked well with Google in the past. 2. 302 redirect the old URLs to the somewhat appropriate page on the new site while - in the meantime - I work on the new site structure and keywords/SEO optimizations. I say 302 because a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages may only do me so good because I would plan on changing the keywords/URL structures of the new site anyway. Once finished with the optimizations, I'd then 301 redirect to the new appropriate pages 3. 301 redirect everything from the old site to the somewhat appropriate page on the new site right away. Then, once I've completed all the appropriate optimizations, I'd need to re-301-redirect to the new pages I've created. As you can see, I'm in a bit of a jam. But, considering that the new site was launched just about 2 weeks ago, maybe there's some hope here. Thanks fellow Mozzers! Hopefully that all makes sense. Cheers!
Conversion Rate Optimization | | pfarsaii
Nickname: "P-drama"0 -
HELP: Analysing data to make decisions, SEO vs PPC
Hi mozers! I have recently been seeing good results in the serps lately for my main keywords in my country NZ, now I'm seeing good results in Australia for these keywords and our USA domain is not far behind and making good progress... However, our NZ results show that we may get around 1 conversion every 3 days from our organic search. I read other places that click share for ppc was much higher, but there is no way we can match our competitors budgets from 3k - 300k per month. So our option was to focus on SEO. To me, the SEO results seem quiet low, however I'm not really sure how to go about diving deep into the analytics of it all to find out where I need to improve or focus on, which keywords are bringing these conversions. Maybe I need to go for long tail keywords etc... It seems my rankings are coming from general keywords which are still highly competitive, but even so, we are not performing to what I know we should be. Our competitors are mostly paying ppc, however I was told my ROI would be better spent via SEO. Any suggestions perhaps what I might be missing or doing wrong in this case. (I have recently done a new design overhaul with a new registration process) I have 3 top level domains you can see the site here http://bit.ly/1yhz96v
Conversion Rate Optimization | | edward-may0 -
Breadcrumbs for ecommerce site
We are doing a major overhaul on our site, and we have some questions about URLs, breadcrumbs and ecommerce. Currently, a product can reside in multiple categories, and can have multiple URLs based on how a user navigates to the page. We handle this via canonicals, but it's awful for SEO on many levels. O-U-C-H. The main issue is that a product can reside in multiple categories. At this point, Plan A for our overhaul is that a product URL is always going to be www.domain.com/product-name-sku.html/. Neat and clean, and avoids end-user confusion if they navigate to the product through a category that doesn't match the URL. Plan B: We can anchor a product to a category or subcategory, (www.domain.com/category-name/subcategory-name/product-name-sku.html) but we think that this cuts down on usability as users can navigate to a product through different categories, and the URL may not match the user's navigation. Based on how Google has devalued URLs for ranking purposes, I don't think that there is much of an SEO advantage to Plan B. Am I wrong? A product can show up in multiple categories - for example: www.domain.com/womens-clothing/ www.domain.com/womens-clothing/dresses/ www,domain.com/womens-clothing/dresses/maxidresses/ Category breadcrumbs take care of themselves. What is the best practice to handle the breadcrumb on the product page considering that there are multiple paths a user can take to a product? Options: 1. The breadcrumb on the product page dynamically changes based on how the user navigates to the page. The URL is always fixed as per above, but we change the breadcrumb based on the session. ex: Product: Black Ruffled MuuMuu Home > Womens Clothing > Black Ruffled MuuMuu Home > Womens Clothing > Dresses > Black Ruffled MuuMuu We would be showing Google different breadcrumbs based on how the bot navigates to the page. Are there any issues with this from an SEO perspective as it would seem to provide the better user experience? 2. The breadcrumb on a product page is always fixed. We anchor a product to a category or subcategory and the breadcrumb is always the same no matter how a user navigates to the product. This is simpler from a development perspective, and we are always showing the same breadcrumb to Google. IMHO, this is not as good for usability. ex: Breadcrumb is always: Home > Womens Clothing > Dresses > Black Ruffled MuuMuu regardless of how a user navigates to it. Which way would our ecommerce experts recommend?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | AMHC0 -
Issue with a particular command of robots.txt! Help needed!
Hi all,I'm facing a strange issue with a website: www.foodmood.itI've written this robots.txt: www.foodmood.it/robots.txt in which I'm using all commands I've tested and used on other websites.The problem is that this website is not indexing correctly, and my fear is that I've written the robots in a wrong way.In this forum I've been taught that this command Disallow: /*? should be substituted with Disallow: /? in order to be sure the crawler is not indexing all the URLs containing a question mark.My question is: do you think this command modified in the above way can cause a problem to my website?I repeat that I've used it on several sites and this is the first time I'm having this kind of problems.Thanks in advance for your help.A.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | OptimizedGroup0 -
Site Customisation - Urgent Input Required!
Hello, We are currently setting up a way of customising a client's site based on PPC campaign. I am wondering whether or not there are any SEO issues we need to be aware of. Overview Our client’s site, as accessed by a user through Google Organic, will be the complete site; the same site Googlebot will see. The site, as accessed by a user through a particular Google Adwords campaign, will return a customised version of the site. How the Customisation is Happening The Adwords campaign will be set up to target a particular region, using Adwords’ built-in location targeting. Its ads will link to pages on the regular site, but each URL will be appended with a URL parameter that will trigger the customisation. A cookie will also be planted in these users’ browsers to ensure that the customisation continues as the user browses from page to page on the site. The majority of the content will be the same but the site will promote a particular store of the client, one local to the searcher. Other stores won’t be promoted on this customised version of the site. SEO Thoughts All pages will have canonical tags on them referencing the original, unmodified version of the page. I personally can’t see any issue with regard to SEO because we are approaching this in the spirit of helping the user. But with launch on the horizon I am starting to worry slightly and would welcome the feedback from anyone else here – are there any SEO issues that may arise from this?
Conversion Rate Optimization | | xerox4320 -
Site Design for SEO & Conversions
This is a Real Estate Website focusing on a local market. What would you change about this site for SEO Purposes? What would you change for Conversion Purposes? What would you change for Visual Appeal and User Experience? Thank you all for your help on this one. http://www.bronxpad.com
Conversion Rate Optimization | | bronxpad0 -
I am trying to make my site a better user experience please help
Hi, i want someone to review my site and let me know what steps i need to do to make it a better experience for the user and to lower my bounce rate which is about 67 at the moment. I am trying to get the advertising and the user friendly to match, i need the adverts to make money and need to make sure i have them in the right place so they get clicked more. I want to reduce my bounce rate and want people to not just read one page but to go to different pages and would like advice on what i need to do. here is the site http://www.in2town.co.uk and here are the example pages that i would like to focus on to increase the user friendly and keep people on my site while making sure i have the adverts in the right place http://www.in2town.co.uk/news/gossip-celebrity/alex-reid-says-he-is-fed-up-with-chantelle-houghton-lies http://in2town.co.uk/news/travel-holiday-news/sainsburys-customers-10-points-back-on-easyjet-flights-with-nectar http://in2town.co.uk/news/small-business-news/how-emerging-technology-can-help-reduce-small-business-costs I am looking for ideas on how to increase the experience and how to keep people longer on my site while at the same time have people clicking the ads by increasing the conversion rate.
Conversion Rate Optimization | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Need help Tracking PPC vs Organic and respective ROI
So I have a client who uses PPC and Organic SEO to drive traffic. Once a user gets to the site, the most common action is to fill out a form. I have Auto Tagging enabled in Adwords so all PPC clicks have "gclid" in the url. I am also grabbing the Google Cookie and parsing it out to determine if the visitor is PPC or Organic. So I have an if statement in my form code to pass PPC vs organic through the form for tracking purposes: $url = 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; if (false !== strpos($url,'gclid')) { ?> Essentially this is saying: If gclid is in the url, or if the cookie contains PPC
Conversion Rate Optimization | | tjsherrill
set the Web field as PPC Else
Set it as Organic. this is working about 80% of the time. I am trying to raise the accuracy. any ideas where I might be missing some data? thanks0