CODEWITHSUNDEEP
htmlseogooglebothreflang
James Ives
James Ives

Reputation: 3365

hreflang with multi regional & multilingual sites

I'm attempting to explore the correct usage of the hreflang tag based on documentation provided by Google but I have some questions in the case where a website has multiple regional sites with different content and localized pages. For example the following urls are valid for the given site, the sub domains are what tell the site which region website the user is requesting, and the /en-us part is what determines the requested locale of that specific region website. Each region website in this example has its own set of content, but it belongs to the same website. Despite the name they service regions and not a specific country, for example au services Australia and South East Asia, not just Australia the country. Other regions like EU are more self explanatory.

Is the correct usage of hreflang to not cross reference each region website, as they are technically not alternative pages of each other due to having content variations, but instead only cross reference the locale variants? For example:

Australia

<head>
 <title>Widgets, Inc</title>
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us"
       href="https://au.example.com/en-us" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de"
       href="https://au.example.com/de-de" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-cn"
       href="https://au.example.com/zh-cn" />
 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default"
       href="https://au.example.com" />
</head>

Europe

<head>
 <title>Widgets, Inc</title>
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us"
       href="https://eu.example.com/en-us" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de"
       href="https://eu.example.com/de-de" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-cn"
       href="https://eu.example.com/zh-cn" />
 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default"
       href="https://eu.example.com" />
</head>

United States

<head>
 <title>Widgets, Inc</title>
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us"
       href="https://us.example.com/en-us" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de"
       href="https://us.example.com/de-de" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-cn"
       href="https://us.example.com/zh-cn" />
 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default"
       href="https://us.example.com" />
</head>

I'm not sure if this is technically correct or if I should be cross referencing the different region pages too. The documentation I could find doesn't seem to acknowledge this case as it seems most examples combine the concepts of locale + country as opposed to locale + region. Also as the tag name suggests these are meant to be alternate versions of these pages, which is confusing because from a content perspective they are not the exact same.

Upvotes: 4

Views: 1007

Answers (1)

HeySal
HeySal

Reputation: 11

It really depends on the level of differentiation between your 'alternates' (even though Google doesn't have a specific level in which they consider content duplicate). If you have pages that have completely different content to each other, I would not use a hreflang tag in those instances. However, if you have a page in US that has the same user intent as a page in Australia and those pages have some regional changes but are largely the same content, I would use your hreflang tags to indicate that they are alternate pages to each other. A hreflang isn't signifying duplicate content but that you have a alternative page to this page for another territory.

Upvotes: 0

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