Href lang and multilingual question

[Ashley-Jacada]

Greetings Moz-Hive mind! I'm hoping you can help me on the internationalisation conundrum below;

We currently have a website with three distinct 'locales' US, SEA and UK we automatically redirect customers using IP recognition to a locale which matches, we also determine their currency based on IP. The issue we currently have is a lot of duplicate content and no use of href lang or rel=canonical tags etc...

My proposed structure would be to create a locale based directory for the three locales we offer.

• / - being US and most other Worldwide
• /uk - being UK
• /as - being Hong Kong and other Asian territories.

How would you suggest we set up the href lang tags for these? Because technically there are going to be multiple language possibilities within. Our main customers are English only if this helps.

Also as a secondary question, how should I set up the Google Search Console settings for each of these directories?

Many thanks in advance.

[DmitriiK]

Hi there.
Well, you setup hreflang very normally - on each of those language based pages specify rel="alternate" hreflang="whatever" href="matching url".

Refer to this video from Google, they explain pretty good what's what and when to use which version: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

[Ashley-Jacada]

Hey Dmitrii, sorry I should have mentioned in the question I understand how href lang works. I am more asking for the best practice implementation when the language might possibly vary? With US and Worldwide and the Hong Kong and Asian territories.

[gfiorelli1]

Your situation is a tricky one, because the SEA area is not a country, and therefore cannot be geo-targeted via Search Console.

To use the hreflang in order to suggest Google to show the /as/ subfolder is possible, though. Simply, you have to implement as many hreflang="en-[Code of the Country] as many are the countries included in the SEA area.

Then, in order to have the USA version being the global one:

1. You should not geo-target it toward USA in Search Console;

2. You should use the hreflang="en" and not the hreflang="en-US" (that will target only users from USA).

3. As an option, you can

4. set up the hreflang="en-US" to suggest google to show / to people using English in the USA;

5. set up the hreflang="x-default" to suggest google to show / to everybody (using English or not), who are not geo-targeted by other hreflang annotations.

Obviously, for UK, you must use the hreflang="en-GB".

[Ashley-Jacada]

Thanks for your detailed response Gianluca! Very helpful.

One question, am I also able to include hreflang="en" under the /as/ subfolder? Looking at Analytics and 80% of our Hong Kong clients are browsing in either en-US or en-GB (complicated).

[gfiorelli1]

Mmm... question: do those users visiting the site from Hong Kong or from USA and/or GB?

Because if that is the situation, then you should check out if you have:

1. Well implemented the hreflang;
2. If you have geo-targeted the /uk/ subfolder to Great Britain/United Kingdom in Search Console.

Said that, following the logic I presented in my first answer, the hreflang="en" should suggest only "/" "(USA) URLs, because you told me that you want the USA version of your site to be also the "Global" one.

If it so, then the "/as/" cannot be paired to the hreflang="en" annotation, because you will have two identical hreflang (hreflang="en") suggesting two different URLs, and that would be wrong and confusing Google so much that it can ignore all the hreflang you may have implemented.

However, in the "home page" of the /as/ subfolder, you should have these hreflang annotations:

1. <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-HK" href="http://www.domain.com/as/"></rel="alternate">
2. <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="http://www.domain.com/as/"></rel="alternate">
3. REPEAT IT SO TO COVER ALL EAS COUNTRIES
4. <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="http://www.domain.com/"></rel="alternate">
5. <rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.domain.com/uk/"></rel="alternate">
6. <rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.domain.com/"></rel="alternate">

[Ashley-Jacada]

Just to let you know, none of the above has been implemented yet, I am still planning the best course of action.

The majority of our clients browsing from Hong Kong have their language set to "en-US" and "en-GB". Is there a way to target these users without showing them the USA version of the site?

The USA version of the site needs to be the global one because the majority of our clients are based there.

Would you be willing to take this conversation offline into email? I would very much appreciate the help.

[gfiorelli1]

A solution could be implementing an alert system (Amazon style), so that people with those characteristics visiting the website and having eventually landed on it (but on / and /uk/ URLs) albeit they are located in HK or other EAS country, they are alerted that the best version of the site for them is the /as/ one.

You can do it via IP detection. Don't do automatic redirection, though.

[Ashley-Jacada]

OK that makes sense. So let me get this straight;

1. USA/Worldwide version - /
                                - hreflang="en" (Can I use "x-default" here instead?)
                                - no targeting within Search Console
2. SEA version - /as/
                                - hreflang="en-HK" (repeat for all SEA territories)
                                - no targeting within Search Console
3. UK version - /uk/
                                - hreflang="en-GB"
                                - targeting United Kingdom on Search Console

• use a selector pop up using IP sniffing to detect if the customer is viewing the wrong version of the page/site.

[gfiorelli1]

Correct.

About using the hreflang="x-default" or the hreflang="en", that depends if you are interested in targeting also users not searching in English.

If not, you can go for the hreflang="en" option.

[Ashley-Jacada]

Thank you so very much!