John Mueller of Google posted a brilliant detailed response to an hreflang implementation query on Reddit. The response is so detailed, I’m afraid that if I attempt to dumb it down, I’ll get it fallacious.
And actually, hreflang just isn’t my factor, that’s one thing that I haven’t got a lot of any expertise with on the technical website positioning entrance. However the response appears tremendous attention-grabbing that I wished to spotlight it for individuals who do a variety of hreflang and multilingual website positioning work.
The query was “Hreflang for language subdirectories already nested inside a area subdirectory: horrible concept?” Click on to the Reddit thread to see the total query.
Right here is John’s response, the factors I discover attention-grabbing is that he mentioned (1) solely do that for the house web page as a result of it may be tremendous advanced, (2) redirect the / house web page for US customers to /us for US customers. Right here is the total response:
My advice could be to not shift /de & /fr into /eu/de or /eu/fr. There is not any website positioning benefit you’d get from that, and site-moves like this are a variety of work. If something, I would take into account transferring “/*” (en-us) right into a “/us” folder. That method you have got clearer separation of the components (“/us/*” is all US, “/fr/*” is all French, and so forth). It could make monitoring a bit simpler, and make it simpler for search engines like google to know the sections (vs transferring /fr into /eu/fr, which might make it even tougher to know sections).
Additionally, hreflang is on a per-page foundation, so you’d do it on all pages. You talked about it as being sections, and maybe you are already doing it correctly, so that is only for completeness. For those who’re not doing it on all pages, I might take into account checking your stats for pages that get confused probably the most (fallacious nation guests), and a minimum of add it there. Likelihood is that is principally your homepage, so for those who’re solely doing it there, you are most likely getting a variety of the worth of hreflang already.
And … for those who do any of this and robotically redirect “/” (simply the foundation homepage) to the suitable model, you could ensure that it is specified because the x-default for the set of homepages. With out doing that, to Google it may possibly seem like “/” is a separate web page from the others.
(edit to elaborate solely on that final half… — that is particularly when you have /us for US, and do geo-IP redirects, which I typically do not suggest)
If for US customers, “/” (simply that web page) redirects to “/us”, AND you have got hreflang throughout /us, /fr with x-default assigned to /us, what can occur is that Google sees “/” as being an English web page, additionally acknowledges /us, /fr as separate pages, after which reveals each “/” and “/(one of many others” within the search outcomes. You’ll be able to keep away from this by setting “/” because the x-default (even when it redirects). Then Google will see “/” because the default “/us” for US, “/fr” for France.
This additionally means that you could’t have “/eu” as x-default (there can solely be one #highlander #xdefault), however you may nonetheless use that by specifying it as hreflang for a bunch of your frequent nations (you may specify a number of nations per URL). So ultimately you’d have “/” = x-default, “/us” for US, “/fr” for France, “/eu” for a bunch of nations, and redirect from “/” to the very best model.
All of that is just for the homepage, I would not do it for any of the opposite pages of the positioning as a result of it is so advanced & arduous to handle, and since the homepage might be the web page that will get probably the most search impressions.
What do you discover attention-grabbing about this response?
Discussion board dialogue at Reddit.
