Hreflang link is always going to the homepage

[WesleySmits]

Hey there fellow Mozzers,

I'm currently performing some work for a webshop which is located at two different TLD's.
example.com and example.nl.

In the head of both websites the hreflang tags have been added to tell Search Engines which site is targeted at which country. That's good

However, the hreflang links are pointing to the homepages of both websites from every page on the websites. Isn't example.nl/blog/ not supposed to link the hreflang tag to example.com/blog/?

[WesleySmits]

Hi Tom,

The php server request uri way would be a good option except that the URLs are different on the different domains.

For example:

• www.example.com/about-us/
• www.example.nl/over-ons/

Therefor i really need a way to define the correct url on a page by page basis. Manually doing this in Wordpress is going to be a pain.

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

You are correct in thinking the hreflang tag should be different on each page, pointing to the different versions of that page, not the homepage.

Unless you feel like manually coding each page you could use php and $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] or js and window.location.pathname to get the current page path and append that to your domain in the hreflang tag in your head?

Or if that seems like a lot of work you can specify your alternate URLs for each language through a sitemap like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/></loc>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="<a href=" http:="" spanish.example.com="" "="">http://spanish.example.com/</xhtml:link>" />

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="">http://www.example.com/" /></xhtml:link>

<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="<a href=" http:="" www.example.com="" "="">http://www.example.com/" /></xhtml:link>

There’s a good post here on the 3 different ways to implement your hreflang tags, per page, in a sitemap and in the http header here: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/implementing-hreflang-tag/

Hope that helps,

Tom

[elementarydigital]

I've found this: http://codecanyon.net/item/hreflang-manager/6543147 but note that I haven't used it personally, so I can't comment on how good it is!

[WesleySmits]

Thanks for the response! Do you happen to know how to properly handle this in Wordpress? Can't find a good plugin for implementing this.

[elementarydigital]

That's how I remember doing it so I hope so This seems to suggest so too: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Good luck!