Traffic drop after hreflang tags added
-
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers.
thespacecollective.com (EU customers)
thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers)
We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice);
EU site (thespacecollective.com)
US site (thespacecollective.com/us/)
Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good.
This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
-
Thank you! Hopefully this resolves my issue
-
Yes, that looks correct now. And in your specific case, x-default might indeed handle the rest since Europe is your default, and that's where the unspecified combinations are most likely to be for you.
I wouldn't be too concerned about site speed. These are just links. They don't load any resources or execute any scripts. For most intents, it's similar to text. The main difference is that they will be links that may be followed by the bots. But really, even though you'll have many lines, you only really have two actual links among them. So, I wouldn't be too concerned about this part.
Good luck.
-
I think I understand, this is going to generate a lot of tags - this could be a problem for website speed.
UK/EU Site:
USA Site:
I'll see how the above goes, I can always add an English version as you suggest, but I think I have targetted the main languages here and hopefully the x-default will resolve the rest.
-
Moon boots. It looks like you decided to target by language, rather than by country-language combinations. And that is acceptible. It has a few issues, for example if you target by FR you are going to send both France and Candaian French speakers to your Europe site (and I don't think you are wanting to do this). On the other hand, if you were instead thinking that you were specifying the country code, no, the code you pasted here does not do that. Per the spec on hreflang, you can specify a language code without a country code, but you cannot specify a country code without a language code. All of the hreflang values you used will be interpreted as language, not country. So, for example, CA will be interpreted as Catalan, not Canada.
Again, I know it's a giant pain to handle all the EU countries. All of us wish Google made it feasible to target Europe as an entity, or at least target y country even. But it's just not the case. Yet. So, the way we do this is generally with application code. Ideally, in your case, I would suggest for that code to generate, for each country, one entry for English in that country (like "en-DE"), and another entry for the most common language in the country (like "de-DE"). That will generate many entries. But it's the only way I know of to effectively target Europe with an English language site.
-
Okay, I think I have it down correctly now:
UK/EU Site:
USA Site:
How does that look?
Yes, I was just using my home page as an example. Each page references its own URL, as opposed to every page referencing the home page URL - but thank you for pointing that out as it could have been easily overlooked!
-
moon-boots. Pretty close now. You should add the x-default to each site too, and they should be identical (whichever one of your sites you want to present for any locales you've omitted).
But also, realize that "en-it" is a pretty fringe locale. Google woudl only propose this to a search visitor from Italy who happened to have preferences set for English in their browser. While there are plenty of people in ITaly who do speak English, there are far fewer who set their browser to "en".
I have the same issue in Europe. Germany is one of our largest markets. I initially targeted, like you've done, just English in each country. We previously (a year ago) had a German-language site, and that one we targeted to "de-de". When we stopped maintaining the German-language site, we changed our hreflang tag to "en-de". We quickly found that all of our rankings dropped off a cliff in Germany. I would recommend, at least for your largest addressable markets, to also include hreflang tags for the primary languages. Thsi is another thing whcih Google hasn't yet made easy. They allow to target by language without country, but not by country without language. At least in hreflang (which was really developed for language targeting). GSC (the legacy version) had country-level targeting there.
Lastly, you included URLs for your home page here. But I'm assuming you realize you need to make the tags page-specific, on every page. If you put these tags as-is on every page, then you would be sending a signal to google equivalent to pointing every one of your site pages to a canonical of your home page (and effectively de-indexing the remainder of your site's pages). I'm assuming you're just using home page as an example in your posts. But if not, then yes, you will need to do page-specific tags for each page (and the self-referencing ones need to match your canonical tag for the page).
-
This is just getting overly complicated, Google need a more elegant solution.
I will try to add each of the EU countries to the EU site and ROW to the USA site. Is this how it should look?
UK/EU Site:
USA Site:
-
So, that's exactly why I wrote that you should include all the EU countries as specified locales, pointing to the EU site. Only everything "unspecified" goes to x-default. Alternatively, you could point AU, CA, NZ to the US site, and make x-default point to your EU site. I don't think that is as good of an approach though. Like I said, everyone who has a EU site has this issue. It's a pain that EU isn't a valid "locale" for hreflang. Maybe something will eventually be in place to handle better. In the interim, we can add hreflang for all the EU countries (or just prioritize the markets you really serve).
-
No, that's not a correct x-default implementation. It should point to the same URL on both sites. Wherever the non-specified locales should go (pick one).
The issue here is that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are redirected to the US site, while EU countries are redirected to the UK site. If I select one of the two, then won't all countries listed above be directed to the UK site?
-
No, that's not a correct x-default implementation. It should point to the same URL on both sites. Wherever the non-specified locales should go (pick one).
As far as reciprocal, Google checks that they are "reciprocal" in that each locale which is pointed to has hreflang tags which point back to the other site for its locale. There is no point in having hreflang tags only on one site.
And, you definitely shouldn't specify just "EN" because that would include the US too.
-
I have now added x-default to both sites, this is how they look:
The Space Collective UK/EU
The Space Collective USA
Does this look correct?
On the EU tags, there's not a "penalty". There's just no "Europe" locale. Since you need to specify valid locales, the only way I know of to scope "Europe" is to include all the locales (or at least the most popular ones. I generally add the primary language for each country, a few languages for countries such as Belgium, and sometime I add en-[country] for all of them if my EU site is in English only.
Also on the EU tags, you should not remove the EU tags and only tag the US site. Tags will all be ignored unless they are reciprocal.
I'm sorry, I don't completely understand what you mean here.
What are your thoughts on simply changing the UK/EU site from "gb-en" to "en"?
I will look at either finding a way to exclude Googlebot from my redirect or offering a popup to customers on which site they prefer to visit. Thank you for the advice here.
-
So, a few things in here to respond to:
On x-default, ideally you want this on both "sites", but it would be the same value. Meaning, you are telling Google that if a search visitor is in the US, serve the US page as a result, if the visitor is in the UK, serve the UK page as a result, and if that visitor is in any other location (one you don't have tags for) then serve the page linked in the x-default tag. So, on both sites, it would have the same value. Wherever you want to send the traffic from any country/language not specified in your hreflang tags.
On the EU tags, there's not a "penalty". There's just no "Europe" locale. Since you need to specify valid locales, the only way I know of to scope "Europe" is to include all the locales (or at least the most popular ones. I generally add the primary language for each country, a few languages for countries such as Belgium, and sometime I add en-[country] for all of them if my EU site is in English only.
Also on the EU tags, you should not remove the EU tags and only tag the US site. Tags will all be ignored unless they are reciprocal.
Lastly, on the redirect. There are several approaches. But if the Google bot tries to index your UK site from a server in the US, and gets auto-redirected, that's not a good thing. One approach is to make the auto-redirect "soft", meaning instead of automatically redirecting, present a dialog asking the visitor whether they want to visit the page they requested, or to instead be redirected to the one suggested for their geographic location. This is also a better user experience for several scenarios like when employees may be using a corporate VPN which is located in another country (like their international headquarters for example), or for when people live near country borders. Yes, you want to treat Google the same way as a person, which is why the "soft" redirect approach has become somewhat of a standard. There are other approaches, like having an international "splash" page, and also yet more approaches. I tend to favor the dialog approach.
-
Thank you for the response.
My system only allows me to add x-default to the US site, but I can code it into both if need be, is this necessary for both?
If Google penalises you for using GB then perhaps I should just use a generic EN? I think to try and add the other EU lang tags without an actual translate option could cause annoy Google, but if I do, it would look like this, correct?
Or would I write en-DE, en-IT, etc?
As for the redirect, I use an external service to do this automatically, and I thought it was best practice to treat Google exactly the same as you treat a customer?
-
While your tags above looks correct, I would also recommend to add "x-default" hreflang tags. This lets the search engines know which version of the page to include in results for search traffic outside of the ones specifically listed.
Related to this, I notice you referred to one of the sites as "Europe", but you only included an en-GB tag. Unfortunately, the specification for hreflang doesn't accommodate "Europe" (I wish it did). So, most of the time I generate hreflang tags for all the most common language/country combinations in Europe, all pointing to the one "Europe" page, when I'm dealing with sites which have a single site for all of Europe. This approach isn't pretty, but I haven't yet found a better one. Perhaps this might explain some of your drop, if now you are only targeting UK and US, whereas before you might have reached other parts of Europe and the world in general.
I would try adding x-default and the other European country/language combinations before just dropping the idea of hreflang tags.
Also, you may want to make sure both of these sites are accessible without redirection from all locations. Search engine bots may arrive from servers anywhere, so you want to make sure you don't auto-redirect them based on geo-ip.
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
-
Targeting/Optimising for US English in addition to British English (hreflang tags)
Hi, I wonder if anyone can help? We have an e-commerce website based in the UK. We sell to customers worldwide. After the UK, the US is our second biggest market. We are English language only (written in British English), we do not have any geo-targeted language versions of our website. However, we are successful in selling to customers around the world on a regular basis. We have developers working on a new site due to launch in Winter 2021. This will include a properly managed site migration from our .net to a .com domain and associated redirects etc. Management are keen to increase sales / conversions to the US before the new site launches. They have requested that we create a US optimised version of the site. Maintaining broadly the same content, but dynamically replacing keywords: Example (clothing is not really what we sell): Replacing references to “trainers” with “sneakers”
International SEO | | IronBeetle
Replacing references ‘jumpers with “sweaters”
Replacing UK phone number with a US phone number It seems the wrong time to implement a major overhaul of URL structure, considering the planned migration from .net to .com in the not too distant future. For example I’m not keen to move British English content on to https://www.example.com/en-gb Would this be a viable solution: 1. hreflang non-us visitors directed to the existing URL structure (including en-gb customers): https://www.example.com/
2. hreflang US Language version of the site: https://www.example.com/en-us/ As the UK is our biggest market It is really important that we don’t negatively affect sales. We have extremely good visibility in SERPS for a wide range of high value/well converting keywords. In terms of hreflang tags would something like this work? Do we need need to make reference to en-gb being on https://www.example.com/ ? This seems a bit of a ‘half-way-house’. I recognise that there are also issues around the URL structure, which is optimised for British English/international English keywords rather than US English e.g. https://www.example.com/clothing/trainers Vs. https://example.com/clothing/sneakers Any advice / insight / guidance would be welcome. Thanks.0 -
How do hreflang attributes affect ranking?
We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate? How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?
International SEO | | Substance-create0 -
Is this setup of Hreflang xml sitemap correct?
Hi, I'm trying to setup hreflang for 2 domains. One is purely a US site and the other domain has the language-country as subdomains. For example: http://www.websiteUSA.com (Targets English - USA) https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA (Targets English - Canada) https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA (Targets French - Canada) https://www.websiteINT/es (Targets Spanish) ..and so on and so forth for about 12 of these international URLs. I created an XML sitemap that looks something like this: <urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><url><loc>http://www.websiteUSA.com</loc></url></urlset> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA</loc></url> <url><loc>https://www.websiteINT.com/fr-CA</loc></url> Question 1: Is this correct? In my actual file, I have all the countries listed and self-referencing. Question 2: I'm hosting this file at https://www.websiteINT.com/hreflang.xml AND at http://www.websiteUSA.com/hreflang.xml. Is this correct? Question 3: Will this help the SERPs direct english speakers from the US to http://www.websiteUSA.com while show SERPs for say English Speakers in Canada to https://www.websiteINT.com/en-CA? Question 4: For some reason, when I put up the xml site, it only listed each URL once instead of the full XML file. Should I have uploaded a text file instead? It doesn't seem to render correctly. Thank you!
International SEO | | SylviaH0 -
Href lang tag - do I need it?
Hey Guys! I have a multi-lingual site in Switzerland serving french and german content. URL structure looks like this: homepage (main) http://www.exmaple.ch/ German http://www.exmaple.ch/de/ French http://www.exmaple.ch/fr/ You can choose a drop down on every page to convert the page into french or german. So there are basically two seperate sites, URL's do not cross over i.e. I have no french pages linking to german pages, it is all pretty good. The default language is german. I have checked in Google.ch/ in both languages french and german for which pages are being served up and they seem all relevant, i.e. on french browser settings when I go to google.ch I see french pages being served and vice versa. My question....Do I need href lang tags? Cheers all!
International SEO | | eLab_London0 -
Google Webmaster showing error for [hreflang='x-default']
Hi There! Using [hreflang='x-default'] tag to target language specific countries on our site but Google Webmaster showing errors even implementation made as per Google guideline but one thing is not clear and we are not sure, this is the reason behind it. Error is showing up only on those pages where 'Google Parameters' are used. For example : https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting?grank=open 'grank=' is defined as a 'Google Parameters' and on the above page 'hreflang' tags are : Also, on page https://www.sitegeek.com/a2hosting [without Google Parameters] same above 'hreflang' tags are taken. But, There is no error on second page URL where no 'Google Parameters' in URL. Therefore, error showing on first URL where 'Google Parameters' are taken. Is this the issue or not? suggest how to remove? -- Rajiv S9vhl3T
International SEO | | gamesecure0 -
Help with hreflang configuration
We currently have different country versions of our site with a hreflang configuration; we have a spanish site targeted for Spain and then different subdirectories for every latin american country we're targeting to. Other than minimal differences, at the moment they are similar until we can handle providing unique content for each country. Our goal, then, would be to show the right one for every Google version, but also to avoid penalties. Our configuration is like this: ... Do you reckon this would be the right approach? Moz is currently telling us that there's duplicate content between the different country subdirectories, and to an extent there is, does that correlate with Google penalizing us for it? Also I've seen examples of self-referential alternates (such as including the in the Mexican version), or to put the canonical referencing the primary http://www.example.com/, will any of this help to our goals? Thanks a lot!
International SEO | | doctorSIM0 -
International websites : hreflang
Hi, i'm looking for good examples with 'href lang' tag (rel="alternate" hreflang="x") Have you examples of websites with this tag? Thanks D.
International SEO | | android_lyon0 -
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