Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Custom hreflang tags in WP & using with Yoast
-
Hi
My clients dev has added custom fields for adding hreflang tags to head of pages such as:
"Rel Type", "The URL", and "Language Code"
Am i right in thinking that until a different language/country version of the site is created these can remain empty or should they still be populated once added say with some sort of global reference or best left blank since will leave the head content global by default ?
Also how important is it to add charset to the language code ? since seems optional ?
Also this set up is on WP multi-site with Yoast and devs asked me the below:
_One thing to note is that Yoast generates its own "canonical" tags - so if _
_you are going to use hreflang tags and canonical tags then you don't need to _
_add a canonical using the custom fields I have set up - Yoast has that _
sorted._But if you are going down the route of NOT having any canonical tags - and _
_using a x-defult for the hreflang tags, I will need to try and suppress the _
_Yoast canonical tag so you can do this. Much depends on your approach and _
what you think is best.So how do i know if using canonicals or x-default, i take it best simplest to leverage Yoast and hence not add canonicals to custom fields ? Isnt x-default just for indicating language selectors/redirector not specific to 1 region? So long as havnt got those then good to proceed with Yoasts generated canonicals ?
Cheers
dan
-
Hello,
I have a Blog In Which I am Using Google Translate, Which Can Convert the Blog into Multilanguages. Is it Suggested to use Herflang Tags in My Blog. Thanks In Advance ( Blog I Have Mention is signature)
Ashish Sharma
-
Thanks again really is a big help
Ive read that correct charsets are important, i take it that plugin handles that correctly ?
Do you know if plugin should work fine in WP Multisite environment with network childs domain mapped with their cctlds ?
Re: "using x-default and removing the canonical is nonsense" The dev just meant if going down route of NOT using canonicals AND using x-default in the hreflang then would need to suppress Yoast in those instances.
Re: "In my example, I used two very similar (if not the same langs), however there are things that change, but those are minimal (take as an example a car "hood", in England a "bonnet"). As those are such minimal changes, I don't think a specific version for GB is needed if you are already serving a US version (that's up to you)." Would you say the same if phrases containing these regional variations (hood vs bonnet) were on your target kw list ? Since i find that whilst Google is getting better at semantic relationships between words i think that they do need to be specifically targeted/appear in content & meta data in order to rank for them, or at least increase chances of ranking for them.
Also re your final paragraph 'car repair centers' would be a logical target kw for such a page so i would have thought it would be beneficial to create 2 versions of this page, 1 for US targeting US spelling & 1 for UK targeting UK spelling (centers vs centres), rather than 1x English to serve both UK & US audiences
Also I would have thought it would be useless showing a list of US car repair centers to UK visitors ?
Sorry for more questions, think that should be it now & thanks again
All Best
Dan
-
Dan,
If you have an English page that is also available on Turkish (same content but rewritten/translated) then an hreflang tag is recommended, not mandatory, but recommended. Although as you said you are already writing in Turkish and geotargeting in GWT, there are other engines too, that regardless their market share, shouldn't be overlooked.
HOWEVER, if you have a page in English not matching a Turkish page, then you don't need the hreflang in that page. The tag is only used when the same content is available on other language/location to tell engines which version they should serve.
What you mention about using x-default and removing the canonical is nonsense. Those are 2 different things and one would not interfere with the other. The plugin I recommended does not mess with Yoast, leaving the canonicals as they should be and adding the hrefland tags as specifies. Check this example on my site English and Spanish using both Yoast and the hreflang Manager plugin:
- English: http://viberagency.com/blog/6-reasons-shouldnt-put-intern-charge-companys-social-media/
- Spanish: http://es.viberagency.com/blog/6-razones-por-las-que-debes-dejar-un-pasante-cargo-de-los-medios-sociales-de-tu-empresa/
Check the source code, both have their canonicals and hreflang tags just fine. We chose to use the English version as the default, as you can see in the x-default.
The hreflang tags should be used only when the content is the same (but targeted to a different audience). Of course of the translation from one language to the other some lines must be rewritten to make sense.
In my example, I used two very similar (if not the same langs), however there are things that change, but those are minimal (take as an example a car "hood", in England a "bonnet"). As those are such minimal changes, I don't think a specific version for GB is needed if you are already serving a US version (that's up to you). In that case (1 english version to all english speakers), you only specify the language, instead of the Language and Region:
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">alternate</a>" href="http://www.example.com" hreflang="<a class="attribute-value">en</a>"/>
Now, just to make sure we have an example that DOES apply a different GEO in en-US and en-GB, could be a page that explains what are car repair centers, plus below it shows a list of repair centers. In these scenario, the content is the same, but the list of repair centers change, you would like to display those in GB to your GB audience (still, from my point of view, useless, but was just an example).
Hope that clears it up
-
Hi Apog
Thanks so much for all that great info !
First of all, the main default site is for general/global targeting so have instructed dev to put on network.domain.com/en (but mapped to tld domain.com) to signify english but not be country specific - global kw research has determined USA spelling to be used predominently with just one or two UK spelt target kw).
The next stage is a Turkish geotargeted site that will be in Turkish language on our WP MS network network.domain.com/tr but mapped with a tld such as www.domain.tr which will be geotargeted in GWT. Given these other geo signals such as gwt, native language in body copy etc is hreflang even needed for such a scenario or due to hreflang is overkill/not needed ?
Re your example (US/GB): You are saying use x-default but my dev says (copied in my question) that if we want to use x-default then would have to suppress Yoast re the canonical, so any ideas how to resolve that ? Does the plugin you linked to handle hreflang without requiring Yoast to be suppressed re having x-default or not applicable since only refers to scenario where not having canonicals.
Also you say your example set up is if the contents not exactly the same, do you mean if they have substantially different content ? And your second point (below the example set up) says if they have the same content - so here do you mean if the only difference is US/vsGB versions of english language/spelling but otherwise identical ? And if our target kw include the USvsGB spelling variations then i take it the en-gb version isnt expendable after all ?
Thanks for all your help and sorry for more questions but i really need to get to the bottom of this asap
Many Thanks
Dan
-
thanks Kristina !
-
Hey Dan,
If I understood correctly, you should use both. Canonical tags are used tell search engines that the content is located on the canonical content, while hreflang points which version should be served to each visitor depending on the user's location/language.
If you Yoast, then they already handle the canonical tags and there's nothing you need to do. For the hreflang, if you have at the moment only 1 version served to all visitors, then those shouldn't be used. However, if you have 2 versions quite similar, like en-US and en-GB then you will need to choose the one that's default, let's say the US version and have the following on each version:
en-US:
- Canonical pointing to it.
- Hreflang x-default pointing to it
- Hreflang en-US pointing to it
- Hreflang en-GB pointing to en-GB version
en-GB:
- Canonical pointing to it.
- Hreflang x-default pointing to en-US
- Hreflang en-US pointing to en-US
- Hreflang en-GB pointing to it
This applies if the en-US and en-GB versions are NOT exactly the same. If the language changes (that's why you create a specific version to each country) you need a canonical in each version pointing to itself.
If the en-US and en-GB have the same contents, then the canonical should point to the en-US version (but there's no need to have the en-GB version really, which makes it useless / expendable).
As you mention that at the moment you do not have any extra langs/regions, then you could leave the tags empty or better remove them.
There's a plugin for wordpress that handles hreflang tags (paid) hreflang Manager
Hope that helps!
-
No need to worry about hreflang (and therefore x-default) unless you're working with international versions of your sites! If Google doesn't see anything referencing international, it will figure out the language and country from the ccTLD and the language you're using on your site. Hreflang tells Google where the international versions of a page are, it isn't necessary to designate a language and location.
Best,
Kristina
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
-
My WP website got attack by malware & now my website site:www.example.ca shows about 43000 indexed page in google.
Hi All My wordpress website got attack by malware last week. It affected my index page in google badly. my typical site:example.ca shows about 130 indexed pages on google. Now it shows about 43000 indexed pages. I had my server company tech support scan my site and clean the malware yesterday. But it still shows the same number of indexed page on google.
Technical SEO | | ChophelDoes anybody had ever experience such situation and how did you fixed it. Looking for help. Thanks FILE HIT LIST:
{YARA}Spam_PHP_WPVCD_ContentInjection : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-tmp.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-includes/wp-vcd.php
{YARA}Backdoor_PHP_WPVCD_Deployer : /home/example/public_html/wp-content/themes/oceanwp.zip
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example2/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example2/public_html/wp-includes/63292236.php
{YARA}webshell_webshell_cnseay02_1 : /home/example3/public_html/content.php
{YARA}eval_post : /home/example4/public_html/wp-admin/28855846.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/wp-22.php
{HEX}php.generic.cav7.421 : /home/example5/public_html/SEUN.php
{HEX}php.generic.malware.442 : /home/example5/public_html/Webhook.php0 -
Deleting Tags Properly - Advice Needed
I have over 18,000 tags. Needless to say, most of them are relatively useless to the user and generate no traffic, while cluttering the site. (I use Wordpress.) My plan is to delete tags, but I want to do so safely as to not accumulate website errors. (Tags pages are noindexed.) What process should I take here? Here was my basic plan (any help is appreciated). 1. Find irrelevant tags that are connected with hardly any posts. 2. Go into the post, and remove said tag. 3. Now, with a tag having a 'count' of 0, I go into Tags, and delete it. Safe, right? But now it seems those tag pages just turned into 404s "Uh-oh...Page not found!" Where do I go from here? Create 410's? Thanks Mike
Technical SEO | | naturalsociety0 -
Do Canonical Tags Pass Link Juice?
I have an ecommerce website where some pages link to a product page with a different URL. EXAMPLE: 1: /category/product1.html (not indexed by Google) with canonical pointing to product1.html Other page link to the product like below. 2: product1.html (indexed by Google) Now the question is, does 1: pass any link juice to product1.html or not? Is it worth to change everything and link only to one URL? My site is running on Magento!
Technical SEO | | bill3690 -
Canonical tag use for ecommerce product page detail
Hi, I have a category page I want to rank. This page has 24 different products quite similar but not exactly the same.
Technical SEO | | amastone
I want to use canonical tag in any product to the parent category.
Is this a right use of the canonical?
Category page I'm talking about is : Finger bits If I understand how to use canonical tags I can improve all my category pages. thanks marco0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Is it ok to use H1 tags in breadcrumbs?
A client has an e-commerce site and she doesn't want a page title on the products page. She has breadcrumbs though. Her website developer suggests putting the H1 on the breadcrumbs. So: products> Gifts > picture frame with h1 tags round the word "picture frame". Is this ok to do? Or is it a bad thing for SEO purposes? Thanks
Technical SEO | | AL123al0 -
Tags showing up in Google
Yesterday a user pointed out to me that Tags were being indexed in Google search results and that was not a good idea. I went into my Yoast settings and checked the "nofollow, index" in my Taxanomies, but when checking the source code for no follow, I found nothing. So instead, I went into the robot.txt and disallowed /tag/ Is that ok? or is that a bad idea? The site is The Tech Block for anyone interested in looking.
Technical SEO | | ttb0 -
Header Tags
Ok so I am writing different pages and the first heading is an H3 just because I wanted to it be a certain size. Then as you see the content, I have an H1 tag. Example page: http://www.oxfordmshomes.net/condos/acadia-court-Oxford-MS you can see that "Acadia First" is the first thing you see on the page and it uses an H3 element. Long story short, my hierarchy is wrong. Does this have any negative effect on my SEO efforts?
Technical SEO | | blake-766240