Hreflang tag on links to alternate language site

[Etna]

Hey everyone!

In the interest of trying to be brief, here's the situation in my favorite form of communication, bullet points!

• Client has two sites; one is in English and one is in Japanese
• Each site is a separate URL, no sub-domains or sub-pages
• Each main page on the English version of the site has a link to the homepage of the Japanese site
• Site has decent rankings overall, with room for improvement from page 2 to page 1
• No Hreflang tags currently used in links to the Japanese version from the English version

Given that the site isn't really suffering for most rankings, would this be helpful to implement on the English version? Ideally, I'd like each link to be updated to the corresponding subject matter of the Japanese, but in the interim it seems like identifying to Google that the link on the other side is a different language might be helpful to both the user and to maybe help those rankings on page two creep a little higher to page one.

Thanks for reading, I appreciate your time.

[katemorris]

I would highly recommend hreflang between the two pages. It needs to be implemented on both sides. Each one referencing itself and the translation. Please let me know if you need code examples!

[Etna]

Hi Kate,

Thanks for your reply! Would you mind expanding on this a bit - did you mean the links to from the English version to the Japanese? Or under the sections on each separate URL? Both? My concern is that the glut of links to the Japanese version might be confused with spam since the languages are different. Here's the code snippet I'd likely use, if you have any thoughts about that let me know:
http://nl.example.com/" />

[katemorris]

For the sake of my example let's use 4 URLs, 2 homepages, 2 internal pages (one for each language).

• www.domain.com
• www.domainjp.com
• www.domain.com/page.html
• www.domainjp.com/pagejp.html

I am suggesting that in the of www.domain.com:

In the of www.domainjp.com:

In the of www.domain.com/page.html:

In the of www.domain.com/pagejp.html:

Using hreflang will just tell the search engines that they are the same pages, only in different languages. If that is true of the pages on each site, then you should implement a structure like the above. You would want a language change option on the sites just in case someone wants to change languages, but it's not necessary.