vs.
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I have a site that is based in the US but each page has several different versions for different regions. These versions live in folders (/en-us for the US English version, /en-gb for the UK English version, /fr-fr for the French version, etc.). Obviously, the French pages are in French. However, there are two versions of the site that are in English with little variation of the content. The pages all have a tag to indicate the language the page is in. However, there are no <hreflang>tags to indicate that the pages are the same page in two different languages.</hreflang>
My question is, do I need to go through and add the <hreflang>tags to each page to reference each other and identify to Google that these are duplicate content issues, but different language versions of the same content? Or, will Google figure that our from the tag?</hreflang>
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Without Hreflang markup the en-US and en-GB pages will be treated as duplicate content. You do not want that. In fact, even with hreflang the two may be considered duplicates if there isn't enough differentiated content.
Also, be careful with canonicals. You shouldn't specify the en-US page as the canonical URL for the fr page. The fr page is its own page and you should use hreflang to specify other language versions.
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Thanks, Martijn. The pages all have self-referencing canonical tags (except for the blog posts which have all non-US English pages referencing the US English version as the canonical page.
I'm going to be safe and implement the HREF Lang tags. Do you think the self-referencing canonical tags on each version of the page are going to cause a problem?
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Hi Mike,
I definitely wouldn't trust only on using the HTML Lang Tag, as that's something that isn't used a lot by sites in the end. Plus it's a vague indicator to Google that that is the actual language that is being used there. I would go with stating the different pages with the HREF Lang tag and worst case go with a canonical tag implementation.
Martijn.
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