Hreflang usage for language & country x only language
-
Hi guys,
I´m dealing with a website of a client where hreflang tags are implemented as follows:
As you can see the hreflang tags reference language & countrycode as well as only the languagecode with the same URL (for french: website/fr/ihr-besuch/online-tickets" hreflang="fr-fr" as well as hreflang="fr" href="https://www.website/fr/ihr-besuch/online-tickets").
Is this a problem and should be corrected so that either language & countrycode is referenced or only languagecode?
Thanks in advance!
-
HI,
I don't know if it would make a huge difference in how google will understand the site but it is not a 'normal' setup as per documentation: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en
If the site does not have different regional variation pages of english (UK vs USA for example) then there is no need to double up hreflang markup with regional notation. You just need the hreflang='en' and it is good for all english language searches regardless of location. Same goes for all the languages.
Personally I would remove the extra regional tags to avoid confusion and keep things as simple as possible.
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
-
Google not detecting Hreflang
Hey everybody, We recently migrated our .co.uk to .com/en. Google for some reason is saying that the .com/en version has no hfrelang tags - even though they are clearly there and have had the same implementation as other language versions of the website. We also did a previous migration 6 months ago for the german version of our website and no hreflang problems there. We add our hreflang tags to our sitemap - which you can find here:
Technical SEO | | mooj
https://camaloon.com/en/web-sitemap.xml Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!! Thanks 🙏0 -
SEO URLs: 1\. URLs in my language (Greek, Greeklish or English)? 2\. Αt the end it is good to put -> .html? What is the best way to get great ranking?
Hello all, I must put URLs in my language Greek, Greeklish or in English? And at the end of url it is good to put -> .html? For exampe www.test.com/test/test-test.html ? What is the best way to get great ranking? I am a new digital marketing manager and its my first time who works with a programmer who doesn't know. I need to know as soon as possible, because they want to be "on air" tomorrow! Thank you very much for your help! Regards, Marios
Technical SEO | | marioskal0 -
Hosting Sites under same IP / subdomain usage?
Hello everyone! The company I am working for is working on selling websites templates to clients in the near future. In terms of SEO purposes, would it be detrimental for our clients if we hosted all of these sites under the same server/IP? Also, in the past we've sold sites under a domain we own, adding them on as a subdomain. For example, we would own yourflowers.com, and if Mark's Flowers wanted a site, we would give him: marksflowers.yourflowers.com These sites are going to be the same niche as we are industry specific (example would be, we sell website templates specifically designed for flower shops around the United States). I want the best possible SEO experience for our clients and I believe using subdomains and hosting under the same server IP can be detrimental, but I wanted to see what the Moz community thinks of this. Any feedback is appreciated! Thanks
Technical SEO | | KathleenDC0 -
Use hreflang for language and regional URLs
I have implemented hreflang on site, seen here http://www.cobaltrecruitment.com/ but Webmaster Tools is returning loads of errors in the international targeting area..... "'“en-sg"' - unknown language code" and "'“en-ar"' - unknown language code" Can anyone suggest what I need to tell my developers to do? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | the-gate-films0 -
301 Clean-Up - Best Practices & Procedure?
Hello Again, I have taken over managing a website for about 2 months and have fixed a whole heap of problems. Im now turning my attention to the URL rewrites as there are ALOT of them. I have fixed the most problematic offenders that were blocking products and all sorts of mischief but I now want to clean them up. The website is on Magento, and there are 240 custom URL rewrites. Question 1: Am i correct that I should edit the links on my website so that they link directly to the new page instead of utilising the re-direct for best SEO results. Question 2: If my website doesn't utilise the URL rewrite (fixed in question 1) its only purpose is to transfer link juice from any external link the page had before. If this page didnt have any external inbound links then I can delete the URL rewrite as it serves no purpose. Question 3: If Q1 and Q2 are correct, what is the quickest way to check the inbound links to a page quickly so I can make a quick decision on if i should remove the re-write. Many Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | ATP1 -
Redirects & 404 Errors
Hi everyone, I'm probably missing some GLARING error here, but I'm hoping you can help me! We recently built a new website on Wordpress and attempted to use a redirect plugin to take care of some old pages. The issue we are having though, is that when you click an old link you are not automatically redirected and instead are given a 404 error page. Then, when you try to view another page (by clicking a navigation item), every pages shows a 404 error. I implemented a redirect plugin, however it seems to start to work then still throws the 404 page. I believe this has something to do with the htaccess file which has the standard WP rewrite info in there... The way the old site was setup was kind of janky, so wondering if it's on that side or if I'm just going crazy. An old URL example would be http://orchards inn.com/index.php/specials and the new page is http://orchardsinn.com/special-offers. Sometimes the redirect seems to work, and others it actually throws a 404 page, then every other page in the navigation is 404'd as well. Your help is GREATLY appreciated!!
Technical SEO | | marisolmarketing0 -
Different URLS for our multi language pages caused penalty?
Hi all, We have a website www.phoneboxlanguage.com with 4 different language versions (Spanish, French, Italian, German). We have all the different versions on totally different URLS. E.G the French URL is www.cours-telephone-anglais.com. Recently this month we saw a huge drop in SERPS for all the 'foreign' language pages. This had happened before for the Spanish and French, which we put down to keyword density issues, so created new URLS for those pages. However now all 4 foreign pages have dropped. Could this be due instead to a penalty for duplicate sites? The content is obviously different due to different languages, but the coding and templates for the sites are the same. How can we find out this is the case and what should we do? I was thinking after some research on the forum to create subfolders in the original (phoneboxlanguage.com) and then create 301 redirects, from the old dropped sites, or would their penalties be bad for our original site, if this were the case? We are obviously very keen to not further damage the site and the original site which remains o.k. Many thanks for your kind help. Quime.
Technical SEO | | Quime0 -
Cloudflare Email Address Protecting & SEO
I have a client who uses Cloudflare to protect their email address on their website from spam and when I crawl their site looking for errors it causes it to report multiple broken links on each page. Does anyone know how this impacts SEO? Should I recommend removing Cloudflare?
Technical SEO | | farlandlee0