Adding hreflang tags - better on each page, or the site map?
-
Hello,
I am wondering if there seems to be a preference for adding hreflang tags (from this article). My client just changed their site from gTLDs to ccTLDs, and a few sites have taken a pretty big traffic hit. One issue is definitely the amount of redirects to the page, but I am also going to work with the developer to add hreflang tags. My question is - is it better to add them to the header of each page, or the site map, or both, or something else? Any other thoughts are appreciated. Our Australia site, which was at least findable using Australia Google before this relaunch, is not showing up, even when you search the company name directly.
Thanks!Lauryn
-
Yes, your own second guess is the correct one.
The hreflang in URL based, not domain base, so you have to specify it for every single URL that needs it.
-
Thank you so much.
Does it suffice if we put this code in the header across the site, or does each unique url need to have a specialized url in the code.
Ex:
Is the following good for the entire site:
Vs.
AND
AND
Etc...up to 100+ pages....
-
First of all remember that the hreflang annotation is not necessarily needed in every page.
Said that, it really depends on your devs facilities what method to use, if in-code or using the sitemaps.Both work fine, and what you should not do is using both at the same time, because the possibility of creating contradictory hreflang annotations increases.
-
It depends on the setup of your site, to be honest.
If you have a Wordpress, Joomla, etc. with really easy access header sections that you can put the code in once and it's done forevermore no matter what pages are added, that's the simplest way.
If your dev can script it to add to each page through the sitemap, that's also a one & done way.
The only thing you really don't want to do is have to add a hreflang tag to every new page you add to the site. As long as you can avoid that, you should be right. We had a client add it to their sitemap but the sitemap wasn't auto-generating the tag so each time they updated they had to re-implement the tags. That was a frustrating time ... now we've got it automatically updating so it's much easier to maintain.
-
I think all the implementations work just about the same. We chose to do it in our sitemaps because that was the easiest for our developer to implement. You should choose one or the other, there's no need to do multiple implementations.
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
-
SEO implications of using Marketing Automation landing pages vs on-site content
Hi there, I'm hoping someone can help here... I'm new to a company where due to the limitations of their Wordpress instance they've been creating what would ordinarily be considered pages in the standard sitemap as landing pages in their Pardot marketing automation platform. The URL subdomain is slightly different. Just wondering if anybody could quickly outline the SEO implications of doing this externally instead of directly on their site? Hope I'm making some sense... Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | philremington
Phil1 -
Sitemap Indexed Pages, Google Glitch or Problem With Site?
Hello, I have a quick question about our Sitemap Web Pages Indexed status in Google Search Console. Because of the drastic drop I can't tell if this is a glitch or a serious issue. When you look at the attached image you can see that under Sitemaps Web Pages Indexed has dropped suddenly on 3/12/17 from 6029 to 540. Our Index status shows 7K+ indexed. Other than product updates/additions and homepage layout updates there have been no significant changes to this website. If it helps we are operating on the Volusion platform. Thanks for your help! -Ryan rou1zMs
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rrhansen0 -
Indexed Pages Different when I perform a "site:Google.com" site search - why?
My client has an ecommerce website with approx. 300,000 URLs (a lot of these are parameters blocked by the spiders thru meta robots tag). There are 9,000 "true" URLs being submitted to Google Search Console, Google says they are indexing 8,000 of them. Here's the weird part - When I do a "site:website" function search in Google, it says Google is indexing 2.2 million pages on the URL, but I am unable to view past page 14 of the SERPs. It just stops showing results and I don't even get a "the next results are duplicate results" message." What is happening? Why does Google say they are indexing 2.2 million URLs, but then won't show me more than 140 pages they are indexing? Thank you so much for your help, I tried looking for the answer and I know this is the best place to ask!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | accpar0 -
301 from old site to new one , Should I point to home page or sub category page ?
Hey Seo Experts, I have a small website ranking for few terms like cabinets sale, buy etc . However what i have now decided is to launch a New website with more different products like living room furniture, wardrobes etc . Out of all these categories on new website Cabinets is one of the SubCategory . Now I do not want to have 2 websites . So wanted to 301 from small cabinets website to newly created website. Some of the doubts I have at the moment is ? 1 Should I REDIRECT 301 to sub category (i,e cabinets) which is purely related to Cabinets or Do a Redirect to HOME PAGE . As I also need more Authority to home page as well , as this is relatively new website ? 2 Second question related to this. If you have multiple sub domains does it divide the total authority & TF.Or it is just Ok to have multiple Sub domains if needed ? Any advice appreciated !! Thanks .
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | aus00070 -
Better Domain and Page Authority Than my compeitors
Hi All, I have a pretty extensive question but wanted a starting point if you don't mind. I have a situation where I created 4 sites that I would say are almost identical other than I have loaned my other websites to other agents. My content is rewritten but it's still roughly the same. You will see, when I give the URL's, that they are similar, and almost identical in templates.My question is going to be, Since I have built some authority on all of these sites, is it wise to simply take them down, or just change the templates and take away the content and start over. If so, what do I do with the existing pages? Or is there a better idea I'm not thinking of? My other question is, this site: goo.gl/Tf00rc Is my main site. It has a higher domain authority and page authority than any of my other local competitors, yet I'm still ranked #13-15 for my main keywords. I will say, many of my other competitors have older domains and I'm sure didn't try to manipulate the serps either. Thoughts and recommendations? Here are my other similar sites which have almost identical templates and very similar content but not copied and pasted content. 1. goo.gl/Wwb0Tg 2. goo.gl/3gpR1X 3. goo.gl/FwD8Bk 4. goo.gl/vpuQv2 My dilemma: I want to make sure that my other agents have a great site that can perform well, as well. If I completely remove these sites, they have no site. I'll say that right now the sites that get the most traffic are the goo.gl/Tf00rc and goo.gl/Wwb0Tg then is the goo.gl3gpR1X, and lastly goo.gl/FwD8Bk so they all get about 3k, 2k, and 1k and 500 visits a month respectively. The total visits of all of these is pretty good. I feel like the max would visits would be around 10k per month in my market. Any help would be greatly appreciated as I have spent a lot of time and money getting these sites where they are only to be penalized, I'm sure, for duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Veebs0 -
Better for SEO to No-Index Pages with High Bounce Rates
Greeting MOZ Community: I operate www.nyc-officespace-leader.com, a New York City commercial real estate web site established in 2006. An SEO effort has been ongoing since September 2013 and traffic has dropped about 30% in the last month. The site has about 650 pages. 350 are listing pages, 150 are building pages. The listing and building pages have an average bounce rate of about 75%. The other 150 pages have a bounce rate of about 35%. The building and listing pages are dragging down click through rates for the entire site. My SEO firm believe there might be a benefit to "no-index, follow" these high bounce rate URLs. From an SEO perspective, would it be worthwhile to "no-index-follow" most of the building and listing pages in order to reduce the bounce rate? Would Google view the site as a higher quality site if I had these pages de-indexed and the average bounce rate for the site dropped significantly. If I no-indexed these pages would Google provide bette ranking to the pages that already perform well? As a real estate broker, I will constantly be adding many property listings that do not have much content so it seems that a "no-index, follow" would be good for the listings unless Google penalizes sites that have too many "no-index, follow" pages. Any thoughts??? Thanks,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Google's form for "Small sites that should rank better" | Any experiences or results?
Back in August of 2013 Google created a form that allowed people to submit small websites that "should be ranking better in Google". There is more info about it in this article http://www.seroundtable.com/google-small-site-survey-17295.html Has anybody used it? Any experiences or results you can share? *private message if you do not want to share publicly...
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GregB1230 -
Want to merge high ranking niche websites into a new mega site, but don't want to lose authority from old top level pages
I have a few older websites that SERP well, and I am considering merging some or all of them into a new related website that I will be launching regardless. My old websites display real estate listings and not much else. Each website is devoted to showing homes for sale in a specific neighborhood. The domains are all in the form of Neighborhood1CityHomes.com, Neighborhood2CityHomes.com, etc. These sites SERP well for searches like "Neighborhood1 City homes for sale" and also "Neighborhood1 City real estate" where some or all of the query is in the domain name. Google simply points to the top of the domain although each site has a few interior pages that are rarely used. There is next to zero backlinking to the old domains, but each links to the other with anchor text like "Neighborhood1 Cityname real estate". That's pretty much the extent of the link profile. The new website will be a more comprehensive search portal where many neighborhoods and cities can be searched. The domain name is a nonsense word .com not related to actual key words. The structure will be like newdomain.com/cityname/neighborhood-name/ where the neighborhood real estate listings are that would replace the old websites, and I'd 301 the old sites to the appropriate internal directories of the new site. The content on the old websites is all on the home page of each, at least the content for searches that matter to me and rank well, and I read an article suggesting that Google assigns additional authority for top level pages (can I link to that here?). I'd be 301-ing each old domain from a top level to a 3rd level interior page like www. newdomain/cityname/neighborhood1/. The new site is better than the old sites by a wide margin, especially on mobile, but I don't want to lose all my top positions for some tough phrases. I'm not running analytics on the old sites in question, but each of the old sites has extensive past history with AdWords (which I don't run any more). So in theory Google knows these old sites are good quality.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Gogogomez0