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Adam Hopkinson
Adam Hopkinson

Reputation: 28793

hreflang tags for Europe

I'd always understood that, because there is no en-EU IETF tag, to target Europe I'd have to either use en or list out an hreflang for each country within Europe.

Looking at the source of Think With Google, I noticed the following:

<link rel="alternate" href="//thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/es-419/" hreflang="es-419" />

Which appears to use a UN M.49 code to indicate Spanish for the Latin America and Caribbean region.

The UN M.49 Wikipedia page also lists a code for Europe - 150.

Does it follow that I could have the following hreflang tag to indicate English for the European market?

<link rel="alternate" href="//example.com/intl/en-150/" hreflang="en-150" />

Upvotes: 4

Views: 4210

Answers (3)

Grazerbeam
Grazerbeam

Reputation: 365

In the Google docs it states the hreflang format consists of XX-YY where:

By this it is conceivable that "en-eu" is actually correct as ISO_3166-1 #EU is noted as being "reserved on request of ISO 4217/MA for the European monetary unit Euro" which dating back to 1998. It specifically lists "eu" code relating to the ".eu" top level domain.

Most of the talk on the net around "en-eu" seems to be option rather than evidence based or direct from Google.

It would be worth running some experiments on "en-eu". I have also asked for more details on this in the Google doc as they specifically show examples for GBP and USD but ignore Euro.

Based on above "en-eu" make the most sense if reserved codes are considered valid to Google Bot.

Upvotes: 2

Slartibartfast
Slartibartfast

Reputation: 1583

As per W3, you can use the region subtags as listed in the UN M.49 region code. So the tag hreflang="en150" is as valid.

The document also states

Only one region subtag can appear in a language tag, and it must appear after the language subtag

So you can't then use en-053(Oceania) together with en-150(Europe)

And since the IANA Language Subtag Registry lists 150, you can use it as any other region tag.

Reference: https://www.w3.org/International/articles/language-tags/#region

Upvotes: 1

David
David

Reputation: 609

If you are not going to specify languages for each European country just set hreflang="en". If you are going to specify English for each European country be aware that only IE (Ireland), MT (Malta) and GB (Great Britain) have English as their official language.

Upvotes: 1

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