Seeking guidance setting up hreflang en-gb for international english website and en-us for North American site

[bearpaw]

Our website is configured like so:

MyCompany.com Websites

• /en-gb - International English
• /fr-fr
• /zh-hans
• /m/en-us - North American site - completely different structure

The first three bullets share a Drupal instance where the North American site uses a different PHP framework and has it's own unique look and structure.

Currently none of the websites have hreflang tags which means that sometimes when searching in the US the en-gb results creep in. I want to turn on hreflang tags for the international english website (en-gb) but my fear is that Google may not return the en-gb results to English speaking users if they are not in the UK. We want these results to appear for anyone who is not in the US who speaks English.

Just a note, Canada is not included in this since they'll be added to the North American site soon and will have their own hreflang tags.

[TomRayner]

Hi there

I'd highly recommend going through Aleyda Solis' international SEO posts here on the Moz blog.  They can teach how to prepare for international SEO, how to approach site structure and how to generate relevant code and hreflang tags.

Here is her international SEO checklist

Here is her Hreflang blog post and generator tool

And 40 tools to help advance your international SEO

They're great reading and nothing that I'd be able to do add to, so I hope this helps!

[bearpaw]

Thanks Tom. Two of these articles I have stumbled upon in my research of hreflang tags and they are filled with very helpful information.

After breezing through the articles rather quickly it seems that if I add the en-us hreflang tags AND the en-gb tags, the following is likely and somewhat obvious to occur:

1. US Searches
    - EN-US results should get priority followed by EN-GB
2. UK Searches
    - EN-GB results should get priority followed by EN-US
3. For search outside of both the US and UK Google will revert to showing the most relevant result without bias to the hreflang tag.

My conclusion is that for EN-GB maybe I should not set hreflang so since we do not necessarily want the results to favor the UK - we want these results to populate searches for everywhere except the US.

Thoughts and feedback would be greatly appreciated.

[Daniel_Morgan]

If you want en-gb to be your standard English language subfolder of the site, I would just use the first part (language) of the href lang: en. The gb part is about country targeting which is actually an optional element. So that way US traffic will go to en-us, the rest will go to your en-gb subfolder.

I would say though that maybe US English is more "international standard" than British English.

Additionally, if the home page of your domain is a country selector (see http://www.emirates.com/index.aspx for an example) then it's a good idea to use X-default. So if you want ALL visitors to first go to your home page, then have them select the country and language which is most appropriate for them, you can use . This lets Google and Yandex know that regardless of country or language, all visitors should go to that home page first. There's more about x-default here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ae/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html

Hope that helps

[bearpaw]

Thank you for the detailed response Danial. Our US website only does business in the Americas (Canada, US, Latin America) which is the reason that setting it as the International site does not make sense to us.

Taking the feedback in it seems that I could get by with the following. Please correct me as needed.

America's Website: www.website.com/en-us
 - hreflang US: en-us
 - hreflang Canada: en-ca
 - Can I have multiple defaults for a single URL when not using x-default?

International English Website: www.website.com/en-gb
 - hreflang: en

French Website: www.website.com/fr-fr
 - hreflang: fr-fr or fr

Chinese Website: www.website.com/zh-hans
 - hreflang: zh-hans

[gfiorelli1]

Can I have multiple defaults for a single URL when not using x-default?

Could you explain better?

Hreflang is alternate annotation... so - for instance - in the en-US home page you must indicate the alternative home pages for en (meant for global use of the en-GB, british version of your site), fr-FR (or fr only), en-CA and zh-hans, and vice versa in all the pages.

If you mean if the x-default can be different on a URL by URL situation - for instance if you want to set up a british product page as default for all users not targeted with specific geotargeting version of the same product page - in theory that is possible, because the hreflang is URL specific and not domain wide.

Said that, you should always state that the british version is meant for all English speaking users apart the geotargeted one (hreflang="en").

The xdefault will tell Google to show the british version URL to all the users from countries and languages not specifically geotargeted (eg.: Spanish speaking users from Spain).