Hreflag Tags - English language & multiple regions
-
My client is concerned about duplicate content on their site which has versions of the same page in multiple regions. All pages are english language and the regions are; Asia, North America, Australia, Europe, UK and Rest of the World. The url just changes the location to a folder e.g. .com/australia
My question is does anyone have any recommendations on how to handle this for Europe, Asia and Rest of the World? Any thoughts would be appreciated
-
First of all, you must ask your client if she target different regions like continents for some reason related to her business.
If not, then going multilingual is the best solution that trying to geotarget countries... also because, as Gaston wrote already, you cannot geotarget anything but nations: no continents, no political or economic states unions (like the UE).
If there's some justified business reason why the client needs to specify different versions for different large areas, then things can be weird, but there's a way to do it: using as many hreflang annotations as they are the countries present in a bigger geo area and targeted by a specific website.
Remember, in fact, that an URL can be annotated with as many hreflang annotations as needed.
i.e.: the www.domain.com targets Italy, UK and France with its English version but not other states for whatever reason (so not able to use simply hreflang="en") and Spain with the Spanish one, then its hreflang will be:
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/" hreflang="es-ES"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-GB"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-IT"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-FR"></rel="alternate">
(I know it would be better to create an Italian and French version too, but this was just an example to give you an idea of what I was saying).
-
Thanks Gaston, appreciate the response. I was pretty sure that'd be the case but good to get another opinion!
-
Hello Jaimie,
In my opinion, I believe that your client should use hreflang tags with just language codes to capture all countries. Because there is no lannguage code for the whole Continent.
Or just create a page for every country you'd like to rank for.Here a few resources to help you more:
Hreflang generator - Aleyda Solis International SEO - Moz Learning Center The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! - Moz Blog The International SEO Checklist - Moz BlogBest Luck!
GR.
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
-
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
Proxy Servers & SEO
Does putting a blog on a proxy server (the pointed at the main site) hurt SEO? i.e. can Google tell? And if they can, does it matter? My server people won't use PHP on their servers but we want a Wordpress blog. So their suggested solution is that they put the blog on a proxy server and point it at the ourdomain.com/blog subfolder on our site. So to all intents and purposes it's hosted in the same place. They assure me this is normal practice and point out that our (main site) images are already being sourced from a CDN. Obviously we'll deal with Google not seeing two separate versions of the same site. But apart from this, is there any negative effect we could suffer from in SEO terms?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | abisti20 -
How to add Canonical Tags on Opencart Products
Does anyone know how to add canonical tags to product pages in Opencart? Is this possible to do in htaccess? If so, how specifically should it be written in? Please do not post any links to other pages which reference generic canonical information as I've read them all and none help. I'm looking for an Opencart specific answer, or a way to do it in htaccess.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | moon-boots0 -
Language/Country Specific Pages All in English
Hi Folks, I have been checking how many pages our competitors have indexed in Google compared to our website and I noticed that one of our main competitors has over 2 million indexed pages and I have figured out that it is because they have language/country specific pages for every page on their website. That being said, these pages contain all of the same content and the language doesn't actually change, it remains in English. Now my question is this. Will this not in fact hurt their rankings, in terms of duplicate content? Or am I missing something here? The URL's essentially do something like www.competitor.com/fr/ for France for example but as I say the content is in English, and duplicates their main website. Seems odd to me but would love your opinions on this. Thanks. Gaz
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PurpleGriffon0 -
Canonical Meta Tag Best Practices
I've noticed that some website owners use canonical tags even when there may be no duplicate issues.For examplewww.examplesite.com has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/" />www.examplesite.com/bluewidget has a canonical tag.......rel="canonical" href="http://www.examplesite.com/bluewidget/" />Is this recommended or helpful to do this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | webestate0 -
Headline tag for images in Photoshelter
Hello! I use Photoshelter for my commercial photography website: http://www.ioansaidphotography.co.uk/ I'm trying to make it better re SEO and all that by filling as much information as I can. I'm using Picworkflow who give you a title, description and keywords for every picture.. But in Photoshelter's IPTC metadata editor, they put an SEO tag by Headline (essentially saying it's important) and not by title. Do you think it's good/useful/safe to use the info Picworkflow gave me for title and put it in Headline? PS: This is for the pictures individually and not the pages. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | IoanSaid0 -
Canonical URL Tag Usage
Hi there, I have a .co.uk website and a .ie website, which have the exact same content on both, should I put a canonical tag on both websites, on every page? Kind Regards
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Shortening Keywords in a title tag
in my title tag i want to have: 3D Renders of Office Refurbishment & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group which unfortunatly is longer than 70 characters, however, to make it fit in 70 characters i could put: 3D Renders of Office Refurb & Interior Design Kent | Complete Group Notice that refurbishment has been changed to refurb, would this be ok for SEO purposes?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CompleteOffice0