Geographical targeting and rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”

[David_ODonnell]

Let me paint you a picture, a site attempts geographical targeting by using sub-directories. However, 'targeting' is used loosely in this case. One sub-directory targets the US, the other is for everywhere else.

For example:

example.com/us/  <-- US

example.com/en/  <--- Everywhere else

The homepage is a map, they get taken to the US site if they click on US, they get the other site if they click anywhere else. The site is effectively duplicated in both folders, the only difference being one is written in US English, the other in UK English.

So, while I am able to set the preferred geo in Google Webmaster tools for the US site, I can't for the everything else site.

Recently I came across  rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” and thought it may be useful. Does anyone know if I can specify more than one language per URL using this method?

For example using multiple instances such as:

Is this possible at all?

Thanks in advance, and I'm open to any other suggestions!

[David_ODonnell]

In case anyone is interested or has a similar issue in the future, I did some further research on this and have come to the conclusion that:

1. You can specify multiple alternate tags per page

2. However, you should only define one language per targeted page

So, in this case the US site will be targeted with

and the 'everything else' site will be best served using the generic english tag of 'en'

Resource: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077