Are my language tags correct?
-
Hello,
I have a Spanish website for Spanish speaking people es.example.com. I also have example.com for all English speaking people across the world.
I want that users who go to google.es and search in English get our example.com site and others who search in Spanish on google.es get the Spanish site.
Should the tags be like this:
Or should we also have this tag aswell to specify? Otherwise we might only show the es.domain even for english queris? :
-
Both the hreflang looks correct if your site is targeting only :
- Spanish speaking users in Spain (hreflang="es-ES")
- English speaking users in Spain (hreflang="en-ES"
If you are targeting English speaking users no matter the country, then you should use the hreflang="en" and not "en-ES".
-
You can create an hreflang with codes "en-es", because "es" also is the iso code of Spain as country, so the hreflang "en-es" is English in Spain (albeit would be better writing en-ES, but Google is not caps sensitive from what I know).
Second... you don't need to use the hreflang in every page, only in the ones that really need it.
For instance, if a page is canonicalized to another, the best way to avoid potential hreflang implementation mistakes (for instance, for not using the canonical URLs in the hreflang annotations) is not implementing it at all... because for its same canonicalized nature.
-
Hi there!
Just to confirm (it was implied by the Google.es comment but international targeting was never specified) - are you looking to target Spanish speakers in Spain only? Or are you attempting to target Spanish speakers worldwide?
If you are looking to target Spanish speaks in Spain only, then yes, this would be correct.
If you are looking to target Spanish speakers globally, you would want the tag to be:
-
Hello!
yeap, those are correct.
And no, you should not create a hreflang tag with es-en. Remember that those tags must be in all pages, and have the self referential tag.Here a few resources to help you more:
Hreflang generator - Aleyda Solis International SEO - Moz Learning Center The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! - Moz Blog The International SEO Checklist - Moz BlogBest Luck!
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
-
International Blog Structure & Hreflang Tags
Hi all, I'm running an international website across 5 regions using a correct hreflang setup. A problem I think I have is that my blog structure is not standardized and also uses hreflang tags for each blog article. This has naturally caused Google to index each of the pages across each region, meaning a massive amount of pages are being crawled. I know hreflang solves and issues with duplication penalties, but I have another question. If I have legacy blog articles that are considered low quality by Google, is that counting against my site once or multiple times for each time the blog is replicated across each region? I'm not sure if hreflang is something that would tell Google this. For example, if I have low quality blog posts: blog/en-us/low-quality-article-1
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MattBassos
blog/en-gb/low-quality-article-1
blog/en-ca/low-quality-article-1 Do you think Google is counting this as 3 low quality articles or just 1 if hreflang is correctly implemented? Any insights would be great because I'm considering to cull the international setup of the blog articles and use just /blog across each region.0 -
Should I put rel next and rel prev and canonical on tags pages
Hi I have a tag pages on a news website each tag page is divided to several pages, but Google does't crawled those pages because the links are in javaScript, I want to do the following things: Change the links to html href Add rel=pref rel=next Add a canonical in each page with the url of the main tag page Do you agree with my solution? Thanks Roy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kadut1 -
Original Source Tag or Canonical Tag for News Publishers?
I have been sourcing content from a news publisher who is my partner for publishing content online. My website deals with sourcing content from a couple of websites. I did use a canonical tag pointing towards the respective syndicated source but I have not seen traffic for those articles. I did some research and found out that Google does have a tag for news publishers which is the "original-source" tag which helps news publishers to give proper credit for their work. Here's a link to the official word by Google" https://news.googleblog.com/2010/11/credit-where-credit-is-due.html Although Google has officially stated that the "syndication-source" tag has been replaced by the "canonical" tag. However, there is no mention about the "original-source" tag.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Starcom_Search
Can I still use the "original-source" tag to syndicate content from my partner site instead of the "canonical" tag? P.S.: The reason why I am not convinced with the use of the canonical tag is because:
1. As per what Google says, duplicate content won't harm my website unless it is spam. (And since we are rightfully content from our partner'website and showcasing it to a larger audience by hosting it on our website as well, we are thereby not indulging in any unethical practices) 2. The canonical tag could possibly hamper my crawl bandwidth issues as it would essentially need the crawler to crawl the whole page to figure out that the canonical is present, post which any possible valuation that my site could have garnered gets lost.3. Moreover, since I am from the news, media and publication industry, content republication is a widely accepted practice and in such cases simply including a link to the original source of the article or using the original source tag should suffice, That being mentioned, I do not want to go ahead without taking a second opinion about this. Kindly help me to resolve this issue.0 -
Canonical Tag help
Hello everyone, We have implemented canonical tag on our website: http://www.indialetsplay.com/ For e.g. on http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=42 we added canonical as http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers?limit=all (as it showcase all products) Our default page is http://www.indialetsplay.com/cycling-rollers Is canonical tag implementation right? Or we need to add any other URL. Please suggest
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Obbserv0 -
Is it alright to repeat a keyword in the title tag?
I know at first glance, the answer to this is a resounding NO, that it can be construed as keyword stuffing,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MIGandCo
but please hear me out. I am working on optimizing a client's website and although MOST of the title tags
can be optimized without repeating a keyword, occasionally I run into one where it doesn't read right if I
don't repeat the keyword. Here's an example: Current title:
Photoshop on the Cloud | Adobe Photoshop Webinars | Company Name What I am considering using as the optimized title:
Adobe Photoshop on the Cloud | Adobe Photoshop Webinars | Company Name Yes, I know both titles are longer than recommended. In both instances, only the company name gets
truncated so I am not too worried about that. So I guess what I want to know is this: Am I right in my original assumption that it is NEVER okay to
repeat keywords in a title tag or is it alright when it makes sense to do so?0 -
Risk Using "Nofollow" tag
I have a lot of categories (like e-commerce sites) and many have page 1 - 50 for each category (view all not possible). Lots of the content on these pages are present across the web on other websites (duplicate stuff). I have added quality unique content to page 1 and added "noindex, follow" to page 2-50 and rel=next prev tags to the pages. Questions: By including the "follow" part, Google will read content and links on pages 2-50 and they may think "we have seen this stuff across the web….low quality content and though we see a noindex tag, we will consider even page 1 thin content, because we are able to read pages 2-50 and see the thin content." So even though I have "noindex, follow" the 'follow' part causes the issue (in that Google feels it is a lot of low quality content) - is this possible and if I had added "nofollow" instead that may solve the issue and page 1 would increase chance of looking more unique? Why don't I add "noindex, nofollow" to page 2 - 50? In this way I ensure Google does not read the content on page 2 - 50 and my site may come across as more unique than if it had the "follow" tag. I do understand that in such case (with nofollow tag on page 2-50) there is no link juice flowing from pages 2 - 50 to the main pages (assuming there are breadcrumbs or other links to the indexed pages), but I consider this minimal value from an SEO perspective. I have heard using "follow" is generally lower risk than "nofollow" - does this mean a website with a lot of "noindex, nofollow" tags may hurt the indexed pages because it comes across as a site Google can't trust since 95% of pages have such "noindex, nofollow" tag? I would like to understand what "risk" factors there may be. thank you very much
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Robots.txt: how to exclude sub-directories correctly?
Hello here, I am trying to figure out the correct way to tell SEs to crawls this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/ But not this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory/ or this: http://www.mysite.com/directory/sub-directory2/sub-directory/... But with the fact I have thousands of sub-directories with almost infinite combinations, I can't put the following definitions in a manageable way: disallow: /directory/sub-directory/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory/sub-directory/ disallow: /directory/sub-directory2/subdirectory/ etc... I would end up having thousands of definitions to disallow all the possible sub-directory combinations. So, is the following way a correct, better and shorter way to define what I want above: allow: /directory/$ disallow: /directory/* Would the above work? Any thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Best, Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau1 -
SEO Best Practice for a multi-language and multi-country website
Hello Moz Community, I hope someone could help me identify the best action to take on an on-page optimization confusion I am currently having. The website I am currently trying to optimize is http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx. There is an option to view a country specific version of the page, or language version (there are 2 drop down menus on the top, for country or for language). When viewing a country specific version of the page, the URL changes depending on country selected. Some country versions also updates the content to the language of that country, but some remain English. Example, when viewing the France version of the page (http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/FR/home.aspx), the content is updated to french version, but when viewing the China version (http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/CN/home.aspx), the content is in English. This is because we have not yet translated for all countries (this will eventually be all translated). Now, when viewing by language, the URL does NOT change. Example, in http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx, you can choose French, German, Italian, Polish, etc. The content of the page will change based on language chosen, but the URL (including page titles, meta-descriptions) will not change. My question is, how should I approach this for on-page optimization? Canonical? Hreflang? Any input, feedback, recommendation, suggestion will be greatly appreciated. Thanks! Sharon
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RiaMT0