International SEO - Hreflang tags and URL Structure
-
Hello, I wonder if any SEO internationalisation experts can help.
We are a UK centric business with a .com domain which all our traffic currently goes to. We have been growing in the US and are therefore looking to internationalise our website by building out some US pages using the subfolder .com/us.
Since the keywords we wish to target in the US are different to the keywords we are targeting elsewhere, when implementing hreflang tags is it possible to use a different URL for the US page?
So let’s say we are targeting ‘estate car’ generally but want to target ’station wagon’ as the keyword for the equivalent US page, can the URLs be different?
Example:
- General page: www.example.com/estate-car
- US: www.example.com/us/station-wagon
Hreflang tags:
Would that be the correct implementation?
Any help or guidance would be much appreciated!
-
Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
Great - that makes sense. I will add en-gb hreflang markup too.
You raise some really good points about organisations having to think clearly about the need to undertake multi-regional / multi-lingual SEO and the potential implications of this. In our situation we've come to the conclusion that there is a business case to undertake this venture. When I joined there was already a US office and a few pages written for the US already published on our website in a different design language. Fortunately these pages were recently created and set not to allow crawling. If they were to be indexed at best they may not rank and at worst they may actually interfere with our other page rankings - as well as causing confusion for users (duplicate product / contact / client pages, different navigation structures, designs etc). In the end we decided the best approach would to be to internationalise our website and target these pages to the region / language they were designed for. But yes definitely has been a challenge!
-
In your original post, you wrote that you are a "UK-centric business". I would think you would want to be as specific as possible to make sure the search engines know to serve the most relevant pages to the UK audience. So, yes, I would definitely include a self-referencing hreflang tag. It also simplifies your process because you can just copy-and-paste the hreflang tags between the versions of the page, with no editing (you put the same exact set of tags on the British page as you do on the American).
However, I'm really only responding to your "how" question. There is also an implicit question of whether you should be doing this. I have to say that from recent experience, no matter how thorough we are with hreflang tags, the search engines inevitably serve up pages across the desired locales. For my brand, I have Australian links showing up in US searches, and US links showing up in British searches, etc. This is even with correct hreflang implementation. In our case, it is a necessity to have multiple localized sites, because we carry different inventory, at different prices, and with different policies in each region. But if that wasn't the case, I would not localize my site between US, British, and Australian English just for language variances. That is a subjective decision, but I have so many problems coming from the wrong pages being served in the wrong geographies, despite thorough hreflang tagging, that I would be very hesitant to create more localizations than absolutely necessary. This wasn't your question, I realize, and also this is purely subjective, but passing along for consideration.
-
Great - thanks for your response.
So we should include x-default markup on the relevant pages (in addition to en-us hreflang tags) to signal to the search engines to show the .com urls to those who do not have the browser language setting set to US-English and the .com/us urls to those who do?
If we don't have specific UK pages do we need to add href lang en-gb markup since x-default covers it?
-
You would want the exact same hreflang tags on both versions of each page. So, that means each has a self-referencing tag, plus an alternate tag pointing to the sister page in another locale, plus an x-default tag. The hreflang tags basically tell the search engines whcih version of the page is appropriate for which locales, and when they are on a page in one locale, it tells the search engine where it can find the equivalent pages for other locales, as well as which one is the "x-default" for any locales you haven't specified.
-
Thanks for your quick reply seoelevated! We don't actually have any specific UK pages at the moment. The main site (written in British English) is www.example.com and is where all our traffic currently goes. We have decided to build specific US pages at subfolder www.example.com/us.
I presume in this scenario it would be good practice to add x-default markup on the .com while adding hreflang en-us to the US pages?
-
Yes, that looks correct. However, I would suggest adding two more hreflang tags to each page. One for "en-gb" (pointing to your UK desired version) and one for "x-default" (pointing to whichever version you would prefer for any other nonspecified locales. You will want all 4 of these on each of the two pages (so each page would include a self-referencing tag. These 2 additional ones are optional, but I think would provide a bit more clear direction to the search engines about which page to present for which locales.
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
-
Unsolved URL dynamic structure issue for new global site where I will redirect multiple well-working sites.
Dear all, We are working on a new platform called [https://www.piktalent.com](link url), were basically we aim to redirect many smaller sites we have with quite a lot of SEO traffic related to internships. Our previous sites are some like www.spain-internship.com, www.europe-internship.com and other similars we have (around 9). Our idea is to smoothly redirect a bit by a bit many of the sites to this new platform which is a custom made site in python and node, much more scalable and willing to develop app, etc etc etc...to become a bigger platform. For the new site, we decided to create 3 areas for the main content: piktalent.com/opportunities (all the vacancies) , piktalent.com/internships and piktalent.com/jobs so we can categorize the different types of pages and things we have and under opportunities we have all the vacancies. The problem comes with the site when we generate the diferent static landings and dynamic searches. We have static landing pages generated like www.piktalent.com/internships/madrid but dynamically it also generates www.piktalent.com/opportunities?search=madrid. Also, most of the searches will generate that type of urls, not following the structure of Domain name / type of vacancy/ city / name of the vacancy following the dynamic search structure. I have been thinking 2 potential solutions for this, either applying canonicals, or adding the suffix in webmasters as non index.... but... What do you think is the right approach for this? I am worried about potential duplicate content and conflicts between static content dynamic one. My CTO insists that the dynamic has to be like that but.... I am not 100% sure. Someone can provide input on this? Is there a way to block the dynamic urls generated? Someone with a similar experience? Regards,
Technical SEO | | Jose_jimenez0 -
Drupal SEO help - Duplicate content but very similar URLS?
Hi, This is a very strange problem and not sure how it has happened. I am adding packages to my website and a duplicate page & almost identical URL is being picked up by Google. E.g. the page I make is http://www.ukgirlthing.co.uk/hen-party/bristol-spa-rty-lunch-pampering-h... but then also appearing is http://www.ukgirlthing.co.uk/hen-party/bristol-spa-rty-pampering-hen-party. The node's are exactly the same, and if i edit one of them, the other also updates. You will notice that the URL's are almost exactly the same, except the words are re-organised slightly? Shall i just delete the URL alias of the duplicate entry or is there something else which is making this happen? These URL's are being picked up as duplicate content, although it's the same node! Hope you can help, Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Party_Experts0 -
What directory should a site go in (url structure)?
Hi All, The is the first actual SEO campaign i've worked on and I had a few question about where the site should live on the server and url structure. The site is in WP and we're using Yoast SEO. Anyway the site lives in a a folder called Coastal, which is a child of the WWW folder. So the permalink of the homepage is mcoastalwindows.com/coastal/. The URL is mycoastalwindows.com. The thing is I can still get to the homepage or any of the pages on the site by typing in the /coastal/. Another example is permalink mycoastalwndows.com/coastal/siding/ and url mycoastalwindows.com/siding/. The urls always display without the /coastal/, so I'm not too worried about people linking to them, but Yoast puts a canonical element to the permalink and always includes the /coastal/. Also I'm seeing that Google displays a lot of the urls with the /coastal/, which is an issue seeing as we don't link to the pages that way. My original thought was to solve this at the source and just move everything out of the coastal directory, but the developer swears that it's more secure being in another folder especially with WP. What would you all do and what is best practice? Would you move everything out of the coastal folder, 301 re-direct, do something with. htaccess, or another solution? Appreciate the input thanks!
Technical SEO | | Mario.Souza0 -
SEO-optimized Urls for Japan: English or Japanese Characters
Hi, Anyone got experience with Japanese Urls? I'm currently working on the relaunch of the Japanese site of the troteclaser.com and I wonder if we should use English or Japanese characters for the Urls. I found some topics on the forums about this, but they only tell you that Google can crawl both without problems. The question is if there is a benefit if Japanese characters are used.
Technical SEO | | Troteclaser1 -
Are Tags in Blogs good?
Hi Is adding tags into Blogs a good idea? Does it help with SEO at all? For example blog/?tag=/Invoicing-Software Will that help us get ranked for Invoicing Software? Regards Andrew
Technical SEO | | Studio330 -
How do I properly use the canonical tag to avoid negative effect from having identical content on 2 url’s?
To illustrate… I have same website uploaded at 2 locations (url’s). Only the domain extensions are different. www.myexample.com
Technical SEO | | swiftseo
www.myexample.org The benefit is that I may run some promos on one location and not the other to help in product surveys/testing. The website content is 98% identical and I understand this content duplication may cause SEO problems. The domain I wish to use for rankings etc is www.myexample.com 1) How do I go about avoiding seo problem? Do I need to place the canonical tag at www.myexample.org ie 2) Do I also place the exact same tag at the .com location or not necessary there? Is there an alternative or more effective option to resolving the problem?0 -
Canonical Tag
Does it do anything to place the Canonical tag on the unique page itself? I thought this was only to be used on the offending pages that are the copies. Thanks
Technical SEO | | poolguy0