Multilingual site (rel="alternate" hreflang="x")

[hjoeng-01]

Hi there,

We have a multilingual site with same content translated into different languages. Some are also in different countries with same language. The issue with our site is that international Google SERP shows our US site before their own country/language site. In order to resolve this issue, we implemented the following rel="alternate" hreflang="x" across all locales:

After testing these out, our US site still shows up on search results in other countries (checked after 2 months).

Are we missing something here? Our guess is that it's not working because we are missing canonical tags or meta language code ().

Thanks in advance.

[hjoeng-01]

Thank you for your reponses!

The reason we didn't set up geotargetting within GWT was that our site is both multi-regional and multilingual. Our site is similar to Google's example below.

"it would make sense to set a target of Canada for a site about restaurants in Montreal; but it would not make sense to set the same target for a site that targets French speakers in France, Canada, and Mali." - Google

We have Spanish sites in  Mexico and Spain targeting Spanish speakers. The "es" and "en" were set as a default to target users in countries we do not cover.

After implementing the rel alternate hreflang tags, we were hoping to resolve this problem but it didn't clean up Google's SERPs.

Any suggestions?

[john4math]

Have you registered each of these country-specific directories of your site within Google Webmaster Tools and set their geographic target?  If not, that's a good place to start.  Here is Google's directions for that.  Maybe that along with the rel alternate hreflang tags will be enough to clean up Google's SERPs.  You don't canonical tags on any of these pages as you want each of them appearing in SERPs depending on the country of the searcher.  The meta language code is more for Bing to understand what's going on (see here).  Google makes more of an effort to figure out the language of each page on their own.  Here is their guide on multi-regional and multilanguage sites.

[JerrodDavid]

I was just reading about this. Is it because you do not have each page set for a specific/location page?

Check out this case study: http://www.themediaflow.com/2012/08/an-international-seo-implementation-tale-sitemaps-relalternate-hreflangx/