Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

Your browser does not seem to support JavaScript. As a result, your viewing experience will be diminished, and you have been placed in read-only mode.

Please download a browser that supports JavaScript, or enable it if it's disabled (i.e. NoScript).

Best way to indicate multiple Lang/Locales for a site in the sitemap

Web Design

1517

Locked

DRSearchEngOpt last edited by

So here is a question that may be obvious but wondering if there is some nuance here that I may be missing.

Question: Consider an ecommerce site that has multiple sites around the world but are all variations of the same thing just in different languages. Now lets say some of these exist on just a normal .com page while others exist on different ccTLD's. When you build out the XML Sitemap for these sites, especially the ones on the other ccTLD's, we want to ensure that using

<loc>http://www.example.co.uk/en_GB/"</loc>

<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en-AU"
href="http://www.example.com.AU/en_AU/"
/>
<xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
hreflang="en-NZ"
href="http://www.example.co.NZ/en_NZ/"
/>

Would be the correct way of doing this. I know I have to change this for each different ccTLD but it just looks weird when you start putting about 10-15 different language locale variations as alternate links. I guess I am just looking for a bit of re-affirmation I am doing this right.</xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br>

Thanks!
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
DRSearchEngOpt last edited by

Yes, you are doing the right thing. You may also want to look at including Meta Tags in the as well. ()
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0
gfiorelli1 last edited by

Maybe the best solution is using a tool like this one by MediaFlow: http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/.

You feed the tool with an .csv file and it returns you with a sitemaps.xml with all the hreflang annotations included.
1 Reply Last reply
Reply Quote 0

Browse Questions

View

From

Sorted by

With category

Explore more categories

Related Questions

Best Practices-Optimize Theme Before Coding or After Coding?

We purchased a Wordpress Real estate theme called wpcasa. My developer started coding it. We hired a new SEO. The SEO looked at a simple page (About Us) and saw about 70 Java scripts and 11 templates and was very dissatisfied with the coding and heavy source code contained in the theme. My SEO claims the optimizing this theme (removing the unnecessary Java Scripts and combining the templates is way too much work and that it would be better to start from scratch and purchase a theme like https://my.studiopress.com/themes/agentpress/ with more compact, efficient and streamlined code. Problem is we need to throw out 2 months and thousands of dollars worth of code. My SEO says that in the day of Google's "mobile first" streamlined code is particularly important. My developer has taken the position that the code can be cleaned up after the design. Where it seems my SEO wants clean code to stat with. I don't know who to is right. Any ideas? Am I better of starting from scratch with a new more efficient theme, or cleaning up the code on the wpcasa theme? The code for the test page is below. Thanks! | |
| | lang="en-US" prefix="og: http://ogp.me/ns#"> |
| | |
| | charset="UTF-8"> |
| | http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> |
| | name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> |
| | rel="profile" href="http://gmpg.org/xfn/11"> |
| | rel="pingback" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/xmlrpc.php"> |
| | |
| | <title></span>About Metro Manhattan - Metro Manhattan Office Space<span class="html-tag"></title> |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | name="description" content="New York City real estate brokerage service helps business tenants acquire office, commercial loft, retail or showroom space anywhere in Manhattan."/> |
| | name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> |
| | property="og:locale" content="en_US" /> |
| | property="og:type" content="article" /> |
| | property="og:title" content="About Metro Manhattan - Metro Manhattan Office Space" /> |
| | property="og:description" content="New York City real estate brokerage service helps business tenants acquire office, commercial loft, retail or showroom space anywhere in Manhattan." /> |
| | property="og:url" content="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/about-us/" /> |
| | property="og:site_name" content="Metro Manhattan Office Space" /> |
| | name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" /> |
| | name="twitter:description" content="New York City real estate brokerage service helps business tenants acquire office, commercial loft, retail or showroom space anywhere in Manhattan." /> |
| | name="twitter:title" content="About Metro Manhattan - Metro Manhattan Office Space" /> |
| | name="twitter:image" content="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/process-01.png" /> |
| | |
| | |
| | rel='dns-prefetch' href='//maps.googleapis.com' /> |
| | rel='dns-prefetch' href='//maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com' /> |
| | rel='dns-prefetch' href='//fonts.googleapis.com' /> |
| | rel='dns-prefetch' href='//s.w.org' /> |
| | rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Metro Manhattan Office Space » Feed" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/feed/" /> |
| | rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Metro Manhattan Office Space » Comments Feed" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/comments/feed/" /> |
| | rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Metro Manhattan Office Space » About Metro Manhattan Comments Feed" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/about-us/feed/" /> |
| | |
| | |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='font-awesome-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/menu-icons/vendor/kucrut/icon-picker/css/types/font-awesome.min.css?ver=4.7.0' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='menu-icons-extra-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/menu-icons/css/extra.min.css?ver=0.11.2' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='contact-form-7-bootstrap-style-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/bootstrap-for-contact-form-7/assets/dist/css/style.min.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='wpsight-favorites-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/wpcasa-favorites/assets/css/wpsight-favorites.min.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='wpsight-listing-labels-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/wpcasa-listing-labels/assets/css/wpsight-listing-labels.min.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='wpsight-listings-map-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/wpcasa-listings-map/assets/css/wpsight-listings-map.min.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='wpfront-notification-bar-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/wpfront-notification-bar/css/wpfront-notification-bar.css?ver=1.7' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='wpfront-scroll-top-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/wpfront-scroll-top/css/wpfront-scroll-top.min.css?ver=2.0.1' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='chld_thm_cfg_parent-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/style.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='fontawesome.min.css-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london-child/assets/css/fontawesome.min.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='load-fa-css' href='https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/font-awesome/4.1.0/css/font-awesome.min.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='wpcasa-london-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london-child/style.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='bootstrap-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/vendor/twbs/bootstrap/css/bootstrap.css?ver=3.3.6' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='bootstrap-dropdownhover-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/vendor/kybarg/bootstrap-dropdown-hover/css/bootstrap-dropdownhover.min.css?ver=1.0.0' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='bootstrap-select-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/vendor/silviomoreto/bootstrap-select/css/bootstrap-select.min.css?ver=1.10.0' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='awesome-bootstrap-checkbox-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/vendor/flatlogic/awesome-bootstrap-checkbox/awesome-bootstrap-checkbox.min.css?ver=0.3.7' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='pushy-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/assets/css/pushy.css?ver=1.2.1' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='lightslider-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/vendor/sachinchoolur/lightslider/css/lightslider.min.css?ver=1.1.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='lightgallery-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/vendor/sachinchoolur/lightgallery/css/lightgallery.min.css?ver=1.2.15' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='animate-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/themes/wpcasa-london/assets/css/animate.min.css?ver=1.2.1' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='dashicons-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-includes/css/dashicons.min.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='google-fonts-css' href='//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:700,400|Raleway:400,300&subset=latin' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='wpmtst-custom-style-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/strong-testimonials/public/css/custom.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='zcffront-jquery-ui-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/zoho-crm-forms/assets/css/jquery-ui.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | rel='stylesheet' id='zcffront-end-styles-css' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/plugins/zoho-crm-forms/assets/css/frontendstyles.css?ver=4.9.5' type='text/css' media='all' /> |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | rel='https://api.w.org/' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-json/' /> |
| | rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/xmlrpc.php?rsd" /> |
| | rel="wlwmanifest" type="application/wlwmanifest+xml" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml" /> |
| | name="generator" content="WordPress 4.9.5" /> |
| | rel='shortlink' href='http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/?p=3800' /> |
| | rel="alternate" type="application/json+oembed" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdev.metro-manhattan.com%2Fabout-us%2F" /> |
| | rel="alternate" type="text/xml+oembed" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-json/oembed/1.0/embed?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdev.metro-manhattan.com%2Fabout-us%2F&format=xml" /> |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | rel="icon" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/metromanhattan_icon-75x75.png" sizes="32x32" /> |
| | rel="icon" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/metromanhattan_icon.png" sizes="192x192" /> |
| | rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/metromanhattan_icon.png" /> |
| | name="msapplication-TileImage" content="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/metromanhattan_icon.png" /> |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | |
| | class="page-template page-template-page-tpl-about page-template-page-tpl-about-php page page-id-3800 page-parent custom-background wpsight-london" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/WebPage"> |
| | |
| | |
| | id="top" class="site-wrapper"> |
| | |
| | |
| | class="header-widgets"> |
| | |
| | class="header-full-width"> |
| | id="section-wpsight_london_listings_search-2" class="widget-section section-widget_listings_search">id="wpsight_london_listings_search-2" class="widget widget_listings_search"> <form <span="" class="html-attribute-name">method="get" action="http://dev.metro-manhattan.com/search/" class="wpsight-listings-search horizontal"></form> |
| | |
| | class="listings-search-default"> |
| | class="row gutter-30"> |
| | class="listings-search-field listings-search-field-text listings-search-field-keyword col-xs-12 col-sm-9"> |
| | class="listing-search-keyword text form-control" title="Keyword or Listing ID…" name=" |
Web Design | | Kingalan1

0
Will There Be Much Impact When Moving Site To New Root Folder?

Hi, ok so I have a pretty big site that is located on my sever /root/current-folder/. I want to rebuild the site completely as it's using software that is out of date and not our main focus anymore (OpenCart). We want to move to a Wordpress platform, but want to have as little impact on the SEO as possible. Our current strategy is: List all URLs/Titles/Meta indexed with Google on current site Create new folder on the server /root/new-folder/ My question is... if I move to a new folder on the server (same TLD) and then re-route the TLD to go to this new folder, will there be more of an impact on SEO that if I start a fresh in the current folder? Thanks
Web Design | | Easigrass

0
Is the User Sitemap dead?

There's a discussion going on in our office about sitemaps. I thought it'd be a good idea to get the thoughts of the Moz community in on it, too. What are your thoughts? is the User Sitemap still an effective tool to utilize?
Web Design | | TaylorRHawkins

1
What's the world's best hosting?

Hello folks, I'm looking at hosting options. In your opinion, what's the best provider out there and why? Cheers, Gill.
Web Design | | Cannetastic

0
How to split organic traffic for A/B testing

This might be a silly questions as I may be missing something completely obvious here, but we are completely new to A/B testing. Our site doesn't receive a phenomenal amount of traffic although we are looking to set up some A/B testing for our popular products. Is there a way to split organic traffic for a specific product page. I'm aware that we need to experiment which one performs better in Analytics but I'm unsure how to redirect 50% of the organic traffic.
Web Design | | Jseddon92

0
Recovering organic traffic and Google rankings post-site-crash

Hi everyone, we had a client's Wordpress website go down about 2 weeks ago and since then organic traffic has basically plummeted. We haven't identified exactly what caused the crash, but it happened twice in one week. We spent a lot of time optimizing the site for organic SEO, improving load times, improving user experience, improving the website content, improving CTR, etc. Then one morning we get a notification from our uptime monitoring service that the site was down, and upon further inspection we believe it may have been compromised. The child theme that the website was using, all of the files were deleted and/or blank. We reverted the website to a previous backup, which fixed the problem. Then, a few days later, the same exact thing happened, only this time the child theme files were missing after the backup was restored. We've since re-installed and reconfigured the child theme, changed all passwords (Wordpress, FTP, hosting, etc.), and we're looking into changing hosting providers in the very near future. The site uses the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, which has recently been reported as having some security flaws. Maybe that was the cause of the problem. Regardless, the primary focus right now is to recover the organic traffic and Google rankings that we've worked so hard to improve over the past few months up until this disaster occurred. The client is in a very competitive niche and market, so I'm pretty frustrated that this has happened after we were making such great progress, Since the website went down, organic search traffic has decreased by 50%. The site and all internal pages are loading properly again (and have been since the second time the website went down), but Google Webmaster Tools is still reporting a number of pages as "not found" witht he crawl dates as early as this past weekend. We've marked all errors as "fixed", and also re-submitted the Sitemaps in Google Webmaster Tools. The website passes the "mobile-friendly" tests, received A and B grades in GTMMetrix (for whatever that's worth), and still has the same original Google Maps rankings as before. The organic traffic, however, and organic rankings on Google have seen a pretty dramatic decrease. Does anyone have any recommendations when it comes to recovering a website's authority and organic traffic after it's experienced some downtime?
Web Design | | georgetsn

0
Mobile Sitemap for Site with Media Queries

I'm doing SEO for a site. It uses Media Queries and the CSS to automatically resize the site for the screen size in use. I.e. the site detects the screen size of say an iPhone and the CSS knows which elements to hide for that screen size and still make it look good. This is great because it will automatically cut down the content to display nicely on small screens - obviating the need for a separate mobile site. What kind of sitemap should be generated since the urls are for desktop and mobile use? Yoast (sweet SEO) said it should have both regular and mobile style sitemap to get both the regular and mobile bots to visit, but didn't elaborate on how that sitemap should look. Do you have a recommendation for how exactly the sitemap should look? Should the sitemap have the urls all twice, i.e. once regular and once with the mobile indicator?
Web Design | | GregoryHaze

1
Considering site navigation options

I am working on a site redesign and re evaluating concepts I haven't thought about for a few years. I generally see site navigation that is either "top-down" or "left bar". Top down navigation normally uses the left nav. for search refinements. The benefit of top nav. is that it clears up the center of the page for non navigation content. The drawback is that you can't fit as many categories in a top nav. Left side nav. can hold a long list of categories, but subcategories are often in the center of the page. In the past, I have preferred to use left nav. with a multi level scroll over search refinement. I believe this allowed users to get to their destination page with fewer clicks. (I have always believed that every required additional click causes lost customers). I also believe that this has caused me to get more juice flowing to deeper pages on sites and better long-tail conversion. This means I have had pages with a LOT of links. With this method, I have tightly controlled my categories. What on other sites are often dynamic search refinements, are on my sites additional categories. I am considering making a site with a top down navigation system. I like the additional screen space in the center I get to work with. Is my assumption about pages created by search refinement wrong? Is it ok for SEO to have a left nav that has a bunch of search refinements that are dynamically created?
Web Design | | EugeneF

0