Website Internationalization

As hreflang is handled on a per page basis, if you have different language versions of your site but not every page is translated, it isn’t a requirement to have hreflang set up for these pages. John recommends choosing the method that best suits individual websites, this could be either including the URL in the hreflang set or not including the URL.

Hreflang doesn’t have to be implemented across an entire site. Sometimes it makes sense to implement hreflang on individual pages or sections where there are problems, or where it is especially important that the correct page is shown.

Content in different language variations should be on different URLs, but it doesn’t necessarily need to be put on subdirectories or subdomains. For example, this could be achieved with different parameters.

To find out if your website is treated as a generic domain, John recommends accessing the international settings in GSC and seeing if you can set an international target.

Content that has been translated by a translator is treated as unique content and not seen as spun content, this is because the words are different when translated from one language to another.

If you’re only seeing issues with how your homepage is being displayed, then you can add hreflang to that page. You don’t have to implement hreflang across large sections of the site.

Empty or thin pages may be displayed in Google’s index if different content is served based on the visitor’s location. E.g. if a full content page is served to US visitors but not to non-US visitors, the page might still be indexed as Googlebot crawls from the US but non-US visitors wouldn’t see the content.

When determining a country to target, John recommends two main methods. The first is using a ccTLD, the other is using a generic TLD and specifyng the geo-targeting in GSC. Both of these methods are equivalent and used by Google to determine language targeting for websites.

Even if you have hreflang set up correctly, Google can fold together similar language version pages and choose one to index, meaning that data in Google Search Console will only be shown for the one selected canonical page.

For Google to be able to process site migrations quickly, they need to be one-to-one moves. Adding new language versions alongside a migration means Google will need to process each of these versions separately which will take longer.