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Hreflang

Commonly known as one of the most complex areas of technical SEO, hreflang tags are used to inform search engines of different country and language versions of a site. There are a lot of complex factors to consider to ensure the correct implementation of these tags and our SEO Office Hours notes cover many real-world scenarios and Google’s recommended course of action.

For more on international website optimization, check out our further resources:

The Ultimate Guide to International SEO

An SEO’s Guide to Hreflang Tags

The Challenges of Website Internationalization for Users & Search Engines

The Most Common Mistakes in International SEO

Getting Your International Website Structure Right

How to Create a Successful International SEO Strategy

Similar Country Pages May Be Treated as Duplicates

Country specific pages which are very near duplicates may still be folded together, even if the pages include hreflang tags. If you include more unique content for each version, it is less likely to happen.

4 Nov 2016

Put Hreflang Tags Higher Up In The Head

John suggests placing your hreflang tags high up in the section, particularly above any JavaScript which modifies the head.

12 Aug 2016

A Broken URL Won’t Break an HREFLANG cluster

If some of your hreflang URLs are broken, it won’t prevent the rest of the hreflang cluster from working.

9 Aug 2016

Hreflang Doesn’t Pass PageRank

Hreflang doesn’t passPageRank. You can still choose to link the pages together to pass PageRank.

29 Jul 2016

Hreflang Requires Multiple Crawls

Google needs to crawl pages with hreflang multiple times to learn that the markup is correct, so there can be a delay of up to a month to be recognised, such as after you have migrated URLs.

8 Jul 2016

Use a Single Language per Page

Multiple languages on the same page makes it harder for Google to understand when a page is relevant to a particular audience so John recommends using a single language per page, and use hreflang to connect the pages.

8 Jul 2016

A JavaScript Modified Head can Break Meta Tags

If things like Hreflang tags in headers are not being picked up, it might be due to a problem with the head, perhaps modified by JavaScript. You can use the Inspect Element tool in Chrome to see the rendered page to validate the header section is correct.

1 Jul 2016

Hreflang Tags Should Match the Target Language

Hreflang language settings should match the content language of the target page, or Google may not display them.

8 Mar 2016

Google Ignores Language Tags

Google doesn’t use any language HTML tags to detect the language of page, they use the text to detect it. They are still used by Bing and translation services.

23 Feb 2016

Hreflang Languages Must Match the Target Page Content

If the languages used in your hreflang tags doesn’t match the target content, they will probably be ignored.

23 Feb 2016

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