Hreflang
Commonly known as one of the most complex areas of technical SEO, hreflang tags are used to inform search engines of different country and language versions of a site. There are a lot of complex factors to consider to ensure the correct implementation of these tags and our SEO Office Hours notes cover many real-world scenarios and Google’s recommended course of action.
For more on international website optimization, check out our further resources:
The Ultimate Guide to International SEO
An SEO’s Guide to Hreflang Tags
The Challenges of Website Internationalization for Users & Search Engines
The Most Common Mistakes in International SEO
Similar Country Pages May Be Treated as Duplicates
Country specific pages which are very near duplicates may still be folded together, even if the pages include hreflang tags. If you include more unique content for each version, it is less likely to happen.
Put Hreflang Tags Higher Up In The Head
John suggests placing your hreflang tags high up in the
section, particularly above any JavaScript which modifies the head.A Broken URL Won’t Break an HREFLANG cluster
If some of your hreflang URLs are broken, it won’t prevent the rest of the hreflang cluster from working.
Hreflang Doesn’t Pass PageRank
Hreflang doesn’t passPageRank. You can still choose to link the pages together to pass PageRank.
Hreflang Requires Multiple Crawls
Google needs to crawl pages with hreflang multiple times to learn that the markup is correct, so there can be a delay of up to a month to be recognised, such as after you have migrated URLs.
Use a Single Language per Page
Multiple languages on the same page makes it harder for Google to understand when a page is relevant to a particular audience so John recommends using a single language per page, and use hreflang to connect the pages.
A JavaScript Modified Head can Break Meta Tags
If things like Hreflang tags in headers are not being picked up, it might be due to a problem with the head, perhaps modified by JavaScript. You can use the Inspect Element tool in Chrome to see the rendered page to validate the header section is correct.
Hreflang Tags Should Match the Target Language
Hreflang language settings should match the content language of the target page, or Google may not display them.
Google Ignores Language Tags
Google doesn’t use any language HTML tags to detect the language of page, they use the text to detect it. They are still used by Bing and translation services.
Hreflang Languages Must Match the Target Page Content
If the languages used in your hreflang tags doesn’t match the target content, they will probably be ignored.