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Upper case or/and lower case in rel="alternate" hreflang
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Hi Mozzers,
I have a question about the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, with an example.
When I use two subfolders for two different countries/languages, for instance www.domain.com/nl-nl/ and www.domain.com/nl-en/ (for the English version) and I want to use the rel="alternate" hreflang tag, do I need to follow the ISO standards concerning Uppercase country code and Lowercase language code (en-NL)? Or is it okay to use the Lowercase country and language code (en-nl), since we also use this in the URL of the Subfolder.
What does Google prefer?
Thanks in advance.
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Hey there, Lowercase is fine.
Not sure why you would have /nl-nl/ and /nl-en/ though, it's either English or Dutch, right?
I've set this up many times before and it works just fine, although it's sometimes a little overkill unless you have the English version of a page ranking higher than the Dutch version in Google.nl for example.
I usually find adding these as separate websites in WMT's and setting the target country correctly for each site you shouldn't have any problems.
So add http://www.domain.com/nl/ as its own site in WMT and set target country to Netherlands, then add http://www.domain.com/en/ as another site and set its target country to UK.
Hope this helps,
Goodluck,
Woody

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