Can multiple hreflang tags point to one URL? International SEO question

[DA2013]

Moz,

Hi Moz,

Can multiple hreflang tags point to a single URL?  For example, if I have a Canadian site (www.example.com/ca) that targets French and English speakers can I have the following:

or would I use:

Any insight would be very helpful and greatly appreciated!

Thank you in advance!

[BlueprintMarketing]

Because you are in the country you wish to target already you could geo-target the domain to Canada and simply use the language but the using set up below would work. You may also want to read this by KATE MORRIS - http://www.stateofdigital.com/use-hreflang/.

You could check the above using http://www.impersonal.me/ and http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool.

Hope this Helps,
Tom

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[katemorris]

Hi!

Your friendly international SEO here. (PS thanks for the call out there Tom)

You cannot point two HREFLANG tags at the same URL because it's impossible to have both languages on the same page. Well, not impossible, just not recommended. I am not sure if you have translations or not, so both possible answers are below.

Translations (FR and EN) Available
If you have a Canadian subsite and it has two translations, you need to use both geo-targeting and HREFLANG. In your case, the /ca would be geotargeted, but then you need to distinguish the two translations somehow. If /ca is how you are geo-targeting, I recommend parameter for translation. So the French translation of the Canadian homepage content would be http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=fr -- for English of the same Canadian homepage content, it would be http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=en.

The canonical set up in that instance is:

Page: http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=fr

Page: http://www.domain.com/ca?lang=en

Note that the HREFLANG tags are the same because you have to reference the current page and all translations of that page.

Translations NOT Available
Now, this answer assumes that you just have the Canadian content in English, or just in French. If that is true, you don't need the HREFLANG. You just need to geo-target the subsite for Canada.

Now I do recommend that you offer translated content for the Canadian audience, but please don't auto-translate content. Just offer it in one language until you can get the resources to have it translated by a real person.

Hope that helps!

[justin-brock]

Kate,

What if I have one url translated into French but want to target French speakers in multiple countries? Would I do this with my hreflang tags:

Note: I generated these with Aleyda Solis's international sitemap generator. Does hreflang="x-default" ever get used?

[Aleyda]

Hi Justin,

If you're targeting French as "language" and not as country, and you only have one French site version for all your french speaking users then you don't need to add the specific country, just the language to the hreflang It's much simpler!

------> English to the US. If you don't only target the US with it but any English speakers worldwide, then remove the US to become:

The same with the French one:

Like that you only need to add these two tags in your English and French (language targeted) URLs

The issue is that you were mixing language and country targeting which are two different things.

I hope this helps!

[justin-brock]

Thank you Aleyda!

Do you know which type of targeting has more impact ... language or country?

I don't know that we need country targeting because we don't display currency or sell offline in physical locations. Also, I doubt we would create multiple French sites ... even if we do want to target France specifically.

[Aleyda]

That's another question that has nothing to do with hreflang usage but about the best International SEO targeting to follow in your case and that will depend a lot on your business and capacity. I wrote about it here: https://blog.kissmetrics.com/how-to-international-seo/ if you still have questions you might want to open a new thread specifically asking about that topic.

[Autoboof]

I have this same question Justin.  Did you find that this is an acceptable setup for hreflang?

[katemorris]

Oh wow. Missed this somehow. I remember answering but the answer isn't here. Weird.

Short answer, this markup would be confusing to a bot. You are telling Google that /fr has multiple regional translations. Which isn't true. If you have one French translation that isn't regionally focused, you need one hreflang tag for that page.

If you are trying to geo-target a specific country, you need to actually make content for that country you are targeting. If you don't have the resources for that, just offer your content in french without geo-targeting and it should rank just fine if it's relevant and strong.

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hey Kate,

I remember this question as well it's a year old now great catch and they answer. Thumbs up.

Imagine if you tried to target all of  different French  dialects   if you tried to target all of that with one url  you would not be able to have the subtle differences between French and Canadian French

just like a US English and Canadian English there are minor details that make a huge difference to Google. Also I'm sure this is been sa just like in US English and Canadian English there are minor details that make a huge difference to Google.

Also I'm sure this is been said  however I think it is worthwhile to host your website in the country you're targeting.  Canada in this case  (This not that it is going to hurt you badly)  as long as hosting it's very fast were you going to target. if you do not however there is evidence pointing to the IP still making a large difference after Geo targeting. )

See Richard Baxter's article on using a UK IP versus US IP on the exact same hosting company and getting a pretty large difference in results based on the IP address  after Geo targeting.

https://builtvisible.com/ip-location-search-results/

What's interesting is WPE (the host) was using a proxy so hosting was still out of the UK  Data center but was assigned or US IP addres.

I hope that helps and agree 100% with what Kate said. She really knows her stuff.

Tom

[justin-brock]

Just an update for everyone. We use sitemaps, rather than meta tags, to do the circular href lang mapping for our localized domains. In doing so, we've found the HREFLANG XML Sitemap Tool from The Media Flow particularly AMAZING! Talk about saving time! Just make a csv file with a comma for each language/locale, upload it, and then download a zip file with all your sitemaps. Beautiful.

watch?v=f85sAafNIUw