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    4. Upper case or/and lower case in rel="alternate" hreflang

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    Upper case or/and lower case in rel="alternate" hreflang

    International SEO
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    • MartijnHoving82
      MartijnHoving82 last edited by

      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.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • seowoody
        seowoody last edited by

        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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