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.
Hreflang : mixing with/without country code for same language
-
Hello,
I would like to display 3 different english versions of my website : 1 for UK, 1 for CA and 1 for other english users.
It would look like this for a page:
. (english content with £ prices)
<link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en-ca" hreflang="en-CA">(english content with $CA prices)</link rel="alternate" href="https:>
<link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en="" " hreflang="en">(english content without currency)</link rel="alternate" href="https:>
I wonder if I can mix this hreflang without country code with hreflangs with country code for the 2 other specific versions... or if the hreflang without country code version will appear whatever the country, even if i specified it .
In other terms, is hreflang="en" > hreflang="en-CA" + hreflang="en-GB" if tagged together on a same page?
Thank you
-
I think you are taking that rather too literally.
For example, as I said the .com could be the one targeted with an hreflang="x-default. A person in the UK would, by definition be served with the .com/uk version.
You wouldn't put a hreflang="x-default on the /uk homepage.
Regards
Nigel
-
The x-default is just what the link you provided says it is:
From Google: The reserved value hreflang="x-default" is used when no other language/region matches the user's browser setting. This value is optional, but recommended, as a way for you to control the page when no languages match. A good use is to target your site's homepage where there is a clickable map that enables the user to select their country.
If you use it for just one language, the issue comes when you have more than one language. The setup for x-default is for when there is no language detected, not that a general, non-regional language is detected.
-
Surely the x-default is, as the tag suggests, a default where no country or language is targeted? So if someone resided in an untargeted country and the site happened to rank it would be that one that came up.
Someone in the UK (which contained a UK target tag) would not go to default first, as you suggest, and then select their own country & language. That's misleading.
I agree that the subfolders would be used to target each country but you would still need both country and language. With Canada you may wish to target en and fr as both are relevant and each would reside in a different sub-folder.
The language is essential imho.
Regards Nigel
-
Actually, the x-default is meant to be for a page that allows users to select a country/language combination.
Alexis, in theory, what you are proposing should work. However, it is not always perfect. There is so much that goes into how Google serves content to each user. You might not see it working perfectly every time, but you can use the non-country with two country-specific hreflang tags together.
In fact, the country coded hreflang tags were meant to be dialect-specific. So a site could have US English content and UK English content, but also more general English content for the rest of the English speaking people.
In fact, it sounds like if the only thing changing is the currency, you might try geo-targeting subfolders. You can do hreflang in addition to that, but geotargeting is what is meant to be used here.
- Content for CA: https://www.domain.com/ca/content
- Content for GB: https://www.domain.com/gb/content
- General Content: https://www.domain.com/content
Claim the subfolders in Google Search Console as different properties and then target each one to those countries in the International Targeting area.
Then add hreflang the way you mentioned with those URLs. However, this setup won't work if you are doing things with another language mixed in. If you are planning on that, let me know.
-
Hi Alexis
If the third one is the default then you need a default hreflang tag.
https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
So the last one would have this tag pointing to it:
More on Google here:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
It will then become the default site for all people not in England or Canada. Google will not see any of them as duplicate content.
Regards
Nigel
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
-
[Very Urgent] More 100 "/search/adult-site-keywords" Crawl errors under Search Console
I just opened my G Search Console and was shocked to see more than 150 Not Found errors under Crawl errors. Mine is a Wordpress site (it's consistently updated too): Here's how they show up: Example 1: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html/feed/rss2 Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword/page2.html Example 2 (this surprised me the most when I looked at the linked from data): URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/3/ Linked From: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html/page/2/ (this is showing as if it's from our own site) http://a-spammy-adult-site.com/search/adult-site-keyword-2.html Example 3: URL: www.example.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html Linked From: http://an-adult-image-hosting.com/search/adult-site-keyword-3.html How do I address this issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rmehta10 -
Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration
Hi everyone, I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of: Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic. Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome. 1. Thin content: Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article. I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer). Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content. A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page. Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend? 2.Keyword cannibalisation: There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles. While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article. Do you have any advice on how to achieve that? Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tbps0 -
Why does Moz recommend subdomains for language-specific websites?
In Moz's domain recommendations, they recommend subdirectories instead of subdomains (which agrees with my experience), but make an exception for language-specific websites: Since search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do subdomains, it is recommended that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains. (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com) The notable exceptions to this are language-specific websites. (i.e., en.example.com for the English version of the website). Why are language-specific websites excepted from this advice? Why are subdomains preferable for language-specific websites? Google's advice says subdirectories are fine for language-specific websites, and GSC allows geographic settings at the subdirectory level (which may or may not even be needed, since language-specific sites may not be geographic-specific), so I'm unsure why Moz would suggest using subdirectories in this case.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Redirect domain or keep separate domains in each country?
Hi all Hoping this might be something that can be answered given the number of variables 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IsaCleanse
My main site is www.isacleanse.com.au (Obviously targeted to Australian Market) and also www.isacleanse.co.nz targeted to NZ. The main Keywords im targeting are 'Isagenix' for both and also Isagenix Australia, Isagenix Perth, Sydney (Australian cities) and Isagenix NZ, Isagenix New Zealand, Isagenix Auckland etc.. for NZ The Australian site gets a lot more traffic and Australian market gets a lot more searches - I also have a section www.isacleanse.com.au/isagenix-new-zealand/ on the Australian site. The question is am I best off redirrecting the .co.nz domain completley to the Australian Domain to give it extra SEO Juice?0 -
Wrong country sites being shown in google
Hi, I am having some issues with country targeting of our sites. Just to give a brief background of our setup and web domains We use magento and have 7 connected ecommerce sites on that magento installation 1.www.tidy-books.co.uk (UK) - main site 2. www.tidy-books.com (US) - variations in copy but basically a duplicate of UK 3.www.tidy-books.it (Italy) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 4.www.tidy-books.fr (France) - fully translated by a native speaker - its' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 5.www.tidy-books.de (Germany) - fully translated by a native speaker - uits' own country based social medias and content regularly updated/created 6.www.tidy-books.com.au (Australia) - duplicate of UK 7.www.tidy-books.eu (rest of Europe) - duplicate of UK I’ve added the country and language href tags to all sites. We use cross domain canonical URLS I’ve targeted in the international targeting in Google webmaster the correct country where appropriate So we are getting number issues which are driving me crazy trying to work out why The major one is for example If you search with an Italian IP in google.it for our brand name Tidy Books the .com site is shown first then .co.uk and then all other sites followed on page 3 the correct site www.tidy-books.it The Italian site is most extreme example but the French and German site still appear below the .com site. This surely shouldn’t be the case? Again this problem happens with the co.uk and .com sites with when searching google.co.uk for our keywords the .com often comes up before the .co.uk so it seems we have are sites competing against each other which again can’t be right or good. The next problem lies in the errors we are getting on google webmaster on all sites is having no return tags in the international targeting section. Any advice or help would be very much appreciated. I’ve added some screen shots to help illustrate and happy to provide extra details. Thanks UK%20hreflang%20errors.png de%20search.png fr%20search.png it%20search.png
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tidybooks1 -
Index process multi language website for different countries
We are in charge of a website with 7 languages for 16 countries. There are only slight content differences by countries (google.de | google.co.uk). The website is set-up with the correct language & country annotation e.g. de/DE/ | de/CH/ | en/GB/ | en/IE. All unwanted annotations are blocked by robots.txt. The «hreflang alternate» are also set. The objective is, to make the website visible in local search engines. Therefore we have submitted a overview sitemap connected with a sitemap per country. The sitemap has been submitted now for quite a while, but Google has indexed only 10 % of the content. We are looking for suggestion to boost the index process.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | imsi0 -
Canonical tag + HREFLANG vs NOINDEX: Redundant?
Hi, We launched our new site back in Sept 2013 and to control indexation and traffic, etc we only allowed the search engines to index single dimension pages such as just category, brand or collection but never both like category + brand, brand + collection or collection + catergory We are now opening indexing to double faceted page like category + brand and the new tag structure would be: For any other facet we're including a "noindex, follow" meta tag. 1. My question is if we're including a "noindex, follow" tag to select pages do we need to include a canonical or hreflang tag afterall? Should we include it either way for when we want to remove the "noindex"? 2. Is the x-default redundant? Thanks for any input. Cheers WMCA
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WMCA0 -
Keyphrase / Keyword arrangement
Hi all, What are your thoughts on the arrangement of keyphrases / words? For example, does it make a difference if the words are arranged in the following way: "Keyword 1 Keyword 2" or "Keyword 2 Keyword 1" Both ways make a phrases which is favourable in the search engines. Can I stick with 1 way or should I be going with both arrangements. Hope that is clear 🙂
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wtfi0