Hreflang Alternate & Pagination
-
Hi everybody,
So I'm setting up hreflang tags on an ecommerce site. The sites are in the USA and Canada. The Canadian site will have fewer products than the American site, meaning that there won't be as many pages in each category as there are on the American site. What is the correct way to handle hreflang tags on these extra category pages?
To put this another way, the American site may have a category with 3 pages of products, while the Canadian equivalent only has 2 pages of products. What happens to this extra American category page (example.com/widget-category/page-3) ?
Does it get an hreflang tag linking to the first page of the equivalent Canadian category (example.ca/widget-category/)?
Does it not get any hreflang tags because it has no true Canadian counterpart?
Does it matter at all if it has a canonical tag pointing to the first page in the series anyway (example**.com**/widget-category/)?
Thanks,
Andrew B.
-
Canonicals and hreflangs must be treated separately.
My rule, and this what I said at LearnInbound, from where SEMRush tweeted the tweet you embedded in your post, is this:
-
First set up and/or solve all canonicalization issues your site may have;
-
Once you have solved the canonicalization issues, you can work on implementing the hreflang only on canonical URLs (not canonicalized)
In that case of pagination the pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al have self-referential rel="canonical", so - ideally - the hreflang must reference to the corresponding pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al of the same pagination in the other country and/or language version.
Finally, you are correct regarding the "view all" being the canonical URL of a paginated series.
-
-
You are right. I didn't know about the right way to paginate with canonical. But the point about Hreflang stands. Don't use Hreflang and canonical together on the same page. If you are using canonical to point to the "View All" version, then use Hreflang on the "View all" versions, and not on the individual pages.
-
"Page-2 and Page-3 on the US site should use rel canonical to point to US Page-1. And Page-2 on CA site should use rel canonical to point to Page-1 on CA."
Sorry to say, but this is wrong. Having this configuration will lead the Googlebot to not index or follow anything on page-2 or page-3 because only page-1 is the canonical page. Use either canonical to "page-all" (if existent) or rel="prev"/"next" (sometimes useful with Robots-Tag with noindex,follow for page-2, page-3 ...)
See > Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html# -
Don't use canonical and hreflang together. I blogged about this very issue: https://hreflang.org/use-hreflang-canonical-together/
What this means for you is that even for Page-2 (for both US and CA), if you are using rel canonical to say that Page-2 is a duplicate of Page-1, then do not use hreflang on Page-2. Using both canonical and hreflang on page-2 will only confuse Googlebot.
In your case, only use hreflang on the canonical versions of the page. i.e., Page-1 on both US and CA sites should point to each other using hreflang. Page-2 and Page-3 on the US site should use rel canonical to point to US Page-1. And Page-2 on CA site should use rel canonical to point to Page-1 on CA.
-
That makes perfect sense! Thanks Gianluca (hope to see you at Mozcon again this year btw!).
-
The example.com/widget-category/page-3 URL cannot have as href in its hreflang="en-CA" the example.ca/widget-category/page-1 because also this other URL - example.com/widget-category/page-1 - has that Canadian URL as href (moreover, that is the correct href for its hreflang="en-CA").
Hence, if you follow your first idea, you will be having a URL (the canadian first page of the paginated list) that will have two different hreflang annotations ( <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-1" hreflang="en-US">and <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-3" hreflang="en-US">, which is totally uncorrect, because you are telling Google to use two URLs for English speaking users in the USA, instead of one.</rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">
Sincerely I wouldn't worry that much. If you are using the rel="prev"/"next", Google will consider the third page of the US listing as a all with the first two pages, hence it should not start showing it in the index.
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
-
Traffic drop after hreflang tags added
We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers. thespacecollective.com (EU customers) thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers) We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice); EU site (thespacecollective.com) US site (thespacecollective.com/us/) Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good. This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?
International SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Hreflang alternate as single-hop 301 - is this actually a problem?
First, this is not a question about whether 301 redirects pass page rank. My question is that if your hreflang alternative page URL is a 301 redirect*, are there any downsides. In all cases with our situation, the 301 redirect is single-hop and working. Tools, such as SEMRush seem to flag this as a non-canonical hreflang error, but I'm not able to find any cases where Google has suggested a redirecting hreflang is a problem. I'd appreciate any information on this issue before we invest extra time on a large international site. *In Drupal, there are scenarios where it's all but impossible to avoid having a 301 redirect in your hreflang alternate URL without significant custom work.
International SEO | | scottclark0 -
How do hreflang attributes affect ranking?
We have a site in English. We are considering translating the site into Dutch. If we use a hreflang attribute does that mean we have to create a duplicate page in Dutch for each English page, or does Google auto-translate? How would duplicate pages, even if they are in a different language, affect ranking?
International SEO | | Substance-create0 -
Hreflang for selected pages?
My English site example.com has 1300 Pages I have launched a Russian transasation of the site example.ru This site has only 20 pages so far. Doubt: I need to set hreflang for all 1300 pages or only for 20 Pages of example.com that are converted to russian? Due to the limitations of the plugins avaialable I need to MANUALLY set hreflang for all 1300 pages of example.com Please guide
International SEO | | Janki990 -
External URLs in hreflang sitemap questions
I'm currently putting together an international sitemap for a website that has an set up like the following: example.com/us
International SEO | | Guyboz
example.com/au
example.com/ca
example.co.uk
example.se I'm planning on including the hreflang tags within sitemaps for each domain, to make sure google serves up the right version. However, I'm a bit sceptical about including the non .com domains within the .com sitemap - and the other way round for .co.uk and .se sitemaps. The way I've been doing it follows the following example: <url><loc>http://www.example.com/us/</loc></url> Putting in the .co.uk and .se domains within the .com sitemap just doesn't feel right - is this actually the right way to do it? Thanks in advance 🙂0 -
What is the best way to rank well on both Google.co.uk & Google.com?
I am working on a website that is primarily a UK based software company but is now expanding into the US. The website is a .com site and is not geo-targeted to any specific location. Currently the site ranks well on Google.co.uk for a number of the focus keywords. We are now targeting Google.com as well to increase visibility in the USA. The site is ranking number 1 for one of the focus terms on Google.co.uk but no where to be seen on Google.com but on another term the site ranks 3rd in both Google.co.uk and .com. There are a number of other terms that rank on the first page in Google.co.uk and on the 3rd or 4th page in Google.com. The server is located in Germany and I do not want to geotarget the site to the US as I am concerned this would have a negative impact on the .co.uk ranking. The site currently has a mix of .com and .co.uk links pointing back to the site, in actual fact possibly more links actually come from US sites already. My original plan was to just focus on building links back to the target pages from US sites rather than creating a US folder on the site and geotargeting that section of the site in WMT and having to build page authority for a completely new page with no existing backlinks. But now that I have a number 1 ranking on .co.uk and the same term not ranking at all in .com as well as a postion 3 ranking for a term in both .co.uk and .com I am slightly confused as to the best options. Any help, advice, opinions would be greatly appreciated.
International SEO | | PaulSimms0 -
Can I point some rel alternate pages to a 404?
Hi everyone, I'm just setting up a series international websites and need to use rel="alternate" to make sure Google indexes the right thing and doesn't hit us with duplicate content. The problem is that rel="alternate" is page specific, and our international websites aren't exact copies of the main UK website. We've taken out the ecommerce module and a few blog categories because they aren't relevant. Can I just blanket implement rel="alternate" and let it sometimes point to a 404 on the alternate websites? Or is Google going to find that a bit weird? Thanks,
International SEO | | OptiBacUK
James0 -
International SEO with .com & ccTLD in the same language
I've watched http://www.seomoz.org/blog/intern... and read some other posts here. Most seem to focus on whether to use ccTLD, subdomains or subfolders. I'm already committed to expanding my US-based ecommerce to Canada with a .ca ccTLD. My question is around duplicate content as I take my .com USA ecommerce business to canada with a second site on a .ca URL. With the .com site's preference set to USA, and the .ca site's geo preference (automatically) set to Canada, is it a concern at all? About 80% of the content would be the same. FYI, .com ranks OK in Canada now and I want .ca to outrank it in Canada. I know 'localizing' content within the same language is important (independent of duplicate content), but this might not be viable in the short run given CMS limitations. Any direct experience to help quantify the impact here between US and Canadian ecommerce? Adding: I'm not totally confident here. From this google webmaster central post it seems that canonical tags aren't needed. I tend to think nothing is truly neutral and want to be confident regarding whether to use canonicals or not. Is it helpful, harmful or harmless? My site already has internal canonical tags and having internal and external would be a pain I think. @Eugene Byun used it successfully, but would the results have been the same without? Thanks!
International SEO | | gravityseo0