Examples of these are: The extended language tags come from the ISO339-3 classification list. They are presented products, services and offers relevant to their country (as well as being legal within their country), as this can lead to bad customer experience, a lost customer, and negative reviews. Definition and Usage. Simple errors such as using an invalid country code, using a country code but missing a language code, or even using an underscore (_) instead of a hyphen (-) can render your hreflang attribute invalid. Website templates that cater for a user experience that they’re used to (i.e., in Baidu items open in new tabs). Language and Country. I have an English site that is designed for the U.S., UK, and Ireland. Hreflang is an HTML or tag attribute that tells search engines the relationship between pages in different languages on your website. Use hreflang to specify the language using the relevant two-letter language code (ISO 639-1).You may also identify the country code, but this must come after the language code, and cannot be used by itself.. Consider adding a generic tag with a language code but no country. From experience, there are four main ways in which the URL structure can reflect internationalization: Hreflang always starts with targeting language, but then can consist of further variables such as: Regardless of how targeted your tags are, they must also follow the below format: Probably the most common interpretation of the above that the majority of us will be familiar with is {language}-{region}. Pro tip: Remember there is a difference between the and

elements. Perhaps you want to go the complete opposite direction to this. Eoghan Henn sparked the conversation on Twitter in followup to SEO pros seeing the hreflang targeting en-UK and {language}-EU working, even though they’re incorrect. Lastly, if you want your international website to work on Bing, you will have to follow their separate guidelines. This might seem like a good idea. This page has more information because it includes the names of countries and languages that are represented by the various codes. Code: Name: af: Afrikaans: af-ZA: Afrikaans (South Africa) ar: Arabic: ar-AE: Arabic (U.A.E.) However, in reality, LA is the region code for Laos, and RW the region code for Rwanda, Google will read these as such. Use this post as your guide to undertanding and properly implementing hreflang tags. Are you certain no one in another country, not even a national living on the other side of the world, will find your service or products useful and become a potential customer or client? Use language and country codes to dictate which webpage to show. For hreflang sitemap tools, you may want to consider an automated solution like described at hreflang-sitemaps.com instead of manually creating a CSV file. To Google, at least, hreflang annotations have been known to be regarded as signals, not directives. For example, if you create a Spanish-language version of your English-language homepage, you would tag it as "Español" by using hreflang="es" so that searchers with an IP address that a search engine has reason to believe is in a Spanish-speaking country are served that page in Spanish … If you want to be reasonably certain that only users from a single country will be served your site in Google’s results, hreflang is not necessarily the best answer. The hreflang value has to follow the standard in order to be used by search engines. This is where to place your hreflang attribute. De este modo, la Búsqueda de Google puede mostrar a los usuarios la versión más adecuada de tu página según su idioma o región. It’s highly unlikely that you’ll come across variant subtags unless you work in very niche and specialized areas. Because of Bing’s market share (which is widely debated) globally, best practice means always including both hreflang and the HTML Meta Language Tag as part of an international technical specification. As we touched on above, Bing doesn’t use hreflang tags to work out the preferred language and country of a page. So, do not expect lots of hreflang implantation to save you from any detrimental effect on rankings because you probably don’t have to worry about it anyway in this instance. It is even probate in certain areas of the world. For example, if you had Spanish content that was localized for Spain, you would include hreflang=”es-es”, while Spanish content for Mexico would be written hreflang=”es-mx”. For example, launching a Spanish website with the code hreflang=”es” won’t just target Spain, it will also provide a localized version for a number of other Spanish speaking countries across Latin America, the Caribbean, and the Spanish speaking population of the United States. You will use Hreflang if—and only if—you have multiple pages (URLs) that all have the same content translated into different languages. The area should contain information that shouldn’t be shown on the page. This means having an hreflang tag that references the language and country of the page itself in addition to identifying the other pages. This generic hreflang="en" tag, for example, will help state to which version of a page an English-speaking user living in Italy should be sent. This is where the domain is appended with a, No, need to use the HTML Meta Language Tag. The hreflang value can also include an optional regional code. Consider that a brand could sell the same 100 things in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia but have unique URLs for each. There is often a lot of debate about absolute vs. relative URLs, however, I always defer the Ruth Burr Reedy’s Moz Whiteboard Friday on the topic. I'm Head of Research & Development at SALT.agency, a bespoke technical SEO consultancy with offices in the UK and the ... [Read full bio], Hreflang Implementation: The 8 Biggest SEO Misconceptions, The Best Practices of Optimizing for International SEO, How to Develop a Solid Business Case for Hreflang Implementation, Everything Hreflang with Bill Hunt [PODCAST], 4 Hidden Hreflang Challenges for International SEO, Hreflang FAQ: 7 Basic Questions You Always Wanted to Ask, 5 Reasons Why Your Clients Don’t Read Your Agency’s Reports, 5 Secrets to Getting the Most Out of Agencies (& How to Avoid Getting Burned), Using different ccTLD domains. Hreflang attributes won’t hurt, but they are not necessary to avoid duplicate content issues on pages that are direct translations of one another. Perhaps you have gone to the effort to use British phrasing and spelling throughout the UK version of your site. Like optimizing for “EU”, other common mistakes are es-LA (Spanish for Latin America), and en-RW (English for the Rest of the World). So it would show that URL to users who have their English set as their language in their browser and those in English-speaking countries. Mexico.cnn.com is not the right answer for "es" (Spanish language) IMO, because it's the Mexican version and should be annotated as "es-mx" ;) Since cnnespanol.cnn.com exists and seems to have worldwide news, I would use this as the "ES" version. For example, your English content could be at https://www.example.co.uk and your Spanish content could be at https://www.example.es. The owner of a multilingual site wants search engines to send people to … This is considered best practice for targeting Russian and China in particular. The third suggested way of implementing hreflang onto a website is through the sitemap.xml. Hreflang is a simple HTML attribute, but it can be challenging to get to grips with.. Google’s John Mueller described hreflang as “one of the most complex aspects of SEO ” because it gets “really hard quickly.”. Note: This attribute is purely advisory. It is definitely worth a watch. When planning your online international expansion and deciding on target markets, you also need to consider how you’re going to target them. And nor does Baidu, China’s preeminent search engine. {extlangtag} tags are subtags that can be used to specify selected languages that are closely identified with an existing primary language subtag. Having worked with a number of companies, varying in both sector and size, I’ve come across a lot of weird and wonderful interpretations and implementations of the hreflang framework. When writing the hreflang tag, always place the language code first, followed by the country code. Some Things To Know Before Implementing Hreflangs. Here is how to get your hreflang tags right! A language or a combination of language and region can be used as a value. When adding hreflang tags to your pages, you have to include a link to every version of the page, including a self-reference. Si tienes varias versiones de una página en diferentes idiomas o dirigidas a regiones concretas, háznoslo saber. Examples of these variants are: Extension subtags allow for extensions to the language tag, such as the extension tag “u”, which has been registered by the Unicode Consortium to add information about the language or locale behaviour. This attribute is only used if the href attribute is set.. For … Continue reading List of Valid Hreflang Codes An example of this in practice is, Using a single domain, typically a gTLD, and using language targeted subdomains. Get our daily newsletter from SEJ's Founder Loren Baker about the latest news in the industry! Yoast explains that the problem with using HTTP headers is that it can add a lot of overhead to every request made on your site, potentially slowing down the user’s browsing experience. Currently, Google and Yandex use the hreflang tag, but Bing and Baidu do not. With hreflang you are only sending a signal to Google — other SEO factors may override the hreflang markup, so make sure you are following Google's guidelines and SEO standards. Hreflang tags can be quite hard to work with, but this article will show how to go with it easy and fast. When implementing hreflang you must consider the countries that you’re targeting, and whether users in those countries support Google as the dominant search engine. For example, en (English), es (Spanish), zh (Chinese). Getting the hreflang implementation correct is important in ensuring users are delivered: If page A links to page B through hreflang, then page B must link back to page A. Flamenco. Additionally, including hreflang tags in the page code adds to HTML size and slows the page load speed. It should do the trick, but it is not a cast-iron guarantee. For example, the English page in the United States would be represented by en-us and the Spanish one would be es-mx. There is a Bing Webmasters article that will teach you how to tell Bing your website’s language and country code, but it appears to be out of date as the http-equiv=”content-language” meta tag it suggests is considered bad practice since HTML5. Hreflang accepts values that define languages ISO 639-1 and countries . The meta-element attribute “language” is not taken into consideration by search engines any more. Language alone. Or does it simply implement hreflang tags and save days’ worth of work? Bing and Baidu do not have an equivalent, but they do support content-language HTML attributes and language meta tags. For example, if your URL is www.mystore.shopify.com, you might also have a Spanish language version at www.es.mystore.shopify.com. That company then has an issue: does it write unique product descriptions, blogs, guides, and category pages for each market to avoid any negative effect on search performance caused by duplicate content? The script subtag was introduced in RFC-46464, and they come from the list of ISO 15924 classification list. Last year SEMrush published findings that 75 percent of websites have hreflang implementation errors. In fact, it might be a great idea if you are 100% sure you don’t want any organic search traffic from outside a single country. Content-language: es Content-type: text/html;charset=UTF-8 It says that the document is intended for Spanish language speakers (it doesn't, however mean the document is written in Spanish; it could, for example, be written in English as part of a language course for Spanish speakers). There are multiple checks built in specifically for international SEO so you can start optimizing your global website! There is also a code within this classification list for en-eng, which is the extension code for English – and is why en-eng when implemented as English for England works (but not as intended). ISO Language Code Table. rel="alternate" – Similar to the rel="canonical" tag, this is code that tells search engines there is another version of this webpage. Another common issue is failing to add a self-referencing hreflang tag to the page. While Google says that the location of a URL within your sitemap files does not matter and you can structure the sitemaps in any way that makes sense for you, please note the limits for an XML sitemap file: 10MB or 50,000 URLs ( elements). If not, your hreflang might not be read correctly. By using this website you agree with, hreflang tags generator on aleydasolis.com, Google still recommends you give its crawlers a hand, Using the Country tab in the International Targeting report, specify language and intended audience on an HTTP header level. If Google can interpret the implementation, then it has a vested interest in trying to display the right content to users, however as Google’s John Mueller goes on to say: My guess is it doesn’t actually work (would be interesting to test though) … IMO you don’t want to implement something in the *hope* that search engines can guess what you mean; it should be exact & consistent instead. How important is hreflang? In April this year, Patrick Stox wrote this great article looking at errors in hreflang that Google can work out (sometimes) and display content as though the tag implementation met best practice. Using hreflang="x-default" is essentially a way of saying, ‘This URL doesn’t target any language – it is open to everyone.’ It is great for if a page caters to many languages or is a language selection page. Google support tells us that the tag can be implemented in one of three ways (you only need to choose one). hreflang tags are a technical solution for sites that have similar content in multiple languages. As a Although the content may be similar in each of the different versions of the article, the difference in country targeting is very important due to potential currency differences, vernacular, and cultures. Content team member writing about SEO and SEMrush's SEO toolkit. Google still recommends you give its crawlers a hand by using hreflangs, but multiple versions of a page will not be regarded as duplicates so long as most of the content is translated. href= – The URL that follows href= is the location of the specified page. Can I use ‘Hreflang=en-us-gb-ie?’ … www.example.com. For example, if your site provides content in French, English, and Spanish, the Spanish version must include a rel="alternate" hreflang="x" link for itself in addition to links to the French and English versions. Thanks to these hreflang tags, this article is now targeting Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States, Mexico, Spain and Argentina. The language code must follow ISO 639-1 format. An example of this in practice is, Again using a single domain, typically a gTLD, different language and content zones are targeted through a subdirectory. Hreflang implementation can solve all kinds of regional and language issues. Multilingual: A website offering its content in more than one language. Instead, Google Search Console can provide a more foolproof, if less forgiving, option if you have a generic top-level domain, such as .com and not something like .ca. The hreflang attribute specifies the language of the linked document.. Hreflang tags generator. The implementation of hreflang annotations can be difficult and is often done wrong. Only one script subtag can be used per hreflang tag. For example, using the hreflang=”es-es” signifies Spanish for Spain rather than hreflang=”es-mx”, which signifies Spanish for Mexico. ES-ES This language-country code targets Spanish speaking users in Spain. Of the three hreflang implementation methods, two stood out as options for our Squarespace template: HTML tags or a sitemap. Hreflang is a tag attribute that helps search engines serve the appropriate version of a website to international web users. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IEFT) specifications can be found here. Nevertheless, to identify a PDF document on your site in English and French versions, the link should appear in the HTTP header something like this: Link: ; rel="alternate"; hreflang="en", ; rel="alternate"; hreflang="fr". hreflang= – The hreflang attribute specifies the country and language of the alternate page. 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