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Google does not index UK version of our site, and serves US version instead. Do I need to remove hreflanguage for US?
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Webmaster tools indicates that only 25% of pages on our UK domain with GBP prices is indexed.
We have another US domain with identical content but USD prices which is indexed fine.When I search in google for site:mydomain I see that most of my pages seem to appear, but then in the rich snippets google shows USD prices instead of the GBP prices which we publish on this page (USD price is not published on the page and I tested with an US proxy and US price is nowhere in the source code).
Then I clicked on the result in google to see cached version of page and google shows me as cached version of the UK product page the US product page.
I use the following hreflang code: rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.domain.com/product" />
rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.domain.co.uk/product" />canonical of UK page is correctly referring to UK page.
Any ideas? Do I need to remove the hreflang for en-US to get the UK domain properly indexed in google?
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Hi Christy, not yet.
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Hi there, have you been able to figure out this riddle yet -- or are you still working on it? We'd love an update!
Christy
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Thanks. Will post an update once we figured out this riddle.
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Worth a try, specifically since nothing else seems to be working at this point.
Sorry I couldn't be more help. Please let us know what the solution is when ever you figure it out.
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No.
But in theroy it should not make a difference.
hreflang can be either implemented in sitemap or in page. -
Do your sitemaps indicate the varying languages. See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en
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Thanks for checking. Yes, rich snippets are frequently not showing currently, however this is a different issue and it may be temporary.
My primary concern is rather that google does not index our sitemap for this domain according to search console and related that they show the .com page as cached version of the .uk page.
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Very odd, when we do a search for "Adorini Firenze - Deluxe" in google UK with a VPN on for the UK it doesn't get any of the price schema markup. Maybe google is having a hard time deciding what to do with the schema so for normal results it doesn't pull any of the schema. What KW are ranking for this page? do you get similar results as us?
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Happens already for many months.
Good idea to test with VPN. I just gave it a try with a UK proxy and same result.
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odd, looks to pull the cached schema, the issue might correct itself with time.
It's a bit of a long shot, but have you tried the lang/country codes completely in lower case? I doubt that will fix it but the tool in this Moz article I found (https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool) generates them in all lower case.
Also out of curiosity are you doing your test searches through a VPN?
https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool
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Sure, click on cached version of the first result in the following google search. Also you see here the rich snippets in USD instead of GBP:
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Well at least we checked off one thing that it is not.
Can you provide a link to the SERP where you are seeing the issue?
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everything looks fine in google search console.
no hreflang errors, no sitemap errors and google crawls every day basically all our pages for many months already.
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Odd, are you seeing any errors in Google Search Console (use to be Google webmaster tools) under Search Traffic/International Targeting. It will show any hreflang errors, I would start there and fix any errors.
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