Hreflang for multple countries but single language

[MickEdwards]

I'm working on a site that has implemented hreflang.

The site is all in English but has slight differences and breaks down to separate domains, so

• example.co.uk
• example.eu
• example.com

the hreflang implementation targets specific countries per domain.

This was tested using http://flang.dejanseo.com.au but Webmaster Tools has thrown up errors.  For example,

**URLs for your site and alternative URLs in 'en_GB' that do not have return tags.  **But every page refers back.Any ideas what's going wrong?

[gfiorelli1]

If your .eu domain targets English in all European countries but UK (and you are targeting the USA with the .com), then you should not use the hreflang:

because that annotation says to Google to show the .eu domain to all the people using English independently from where they are, but in the UK ("show domain.co.uk") and USA ("show domain.com"). In other words, you .eu site would be visible to Canadian, Australians or even people in Greenland using English.

If that is also the meaning of the .eu domain, than that's fine, but if it is meant just for European countries, then better not having it.

Moreover, if the .eu is meant as "global", then it is useless to add all the hreflang like "en-it", "en-es" and so on, because the hreflang="en" would be enough.

However, I hope you are considering the .eu in English for targeting countries like Italy, Spain, France, Germany et al as temporary, because - let me tell you - you are not going to see lot of traffic from European not English speaking countries. Why? Because we don't search in English, neither we have our browser set up to use English as main language

[BlueprintMarketing]

You  should consider using either one subfolder hreflang or  strongly considering wire going into these markets for instance Germany would be best for .de  if you are just targeting a European country that speaks English for only English-speaking countries throughout the world you may be best off with  A geotld

i agree with  Gianluca.

[MickEdwards]

This is a bit difficult.  All 3 domains are bringing in some good diverse country traffic as is, but Google has said it will now ignore hreflang until resolved.

So for example, .com  brings in traffic and sales from Chile, Mexico and Bahamas.  So if we removed the 'global'  for .com are we not risking dropping the traffic for these locations.  Or will Google ignore anyway and serve?  There are too many countries getting traffic to implement each one as hreflang and remove the global en, it would be massive.

But having said that if the server was setting the TLD to be served depending on location it would then be adequate to just use the 'global' hreflang's to hreflang="en"?  Is that right?

[NickJasuja]

I believe what's happening with your site is the same thing as what happened here on Google webmaster forums. JohnMu replied in that thread to say that because you have the same content on different sites (it might say en-US or en-GB but there is no detectable language customization for country). Google considers this duplicate content and starts ignoring some of your pages. And when some pages get ignored, the hreflang return tags from those pages go missing.

I blogged about this phenomenon in detail here.

Of course, it's also possible that your Hreflang markup has errors that the dejan seo tool did not detect. You can try the tool at hreflang.org to get a second opinion.

[MickEdwards]

thanks.  I'm taking a look.

[MickEdwards]

Hi Nikhilesh,

as a matter of interest is your tool crawling as a google bot, rather than some IP?  We have now set to deliver TLD depending on IP but the tool reports the following for the hreflangs not on the same domain

• Could not load this page. Server responded with HTTP Status code 301. Expected HTTP response code is 200 OK.

[NickJasuja]

Hi Michael,

The tool crawls with the user agent "Hreflang.org Testing Tool - Desktop version". It does not impersonate Googlebot. It does not follow 301 redirects because if you use Hreflang to point to another page, you should link to the canonical version of that page. A 301 redirect indicates an error.

My opinion is that forced, IP-based redirection is not a good idea because all URLs must be accessible from all locations. Google recently (about a year ago?) started crawling from other countries but you still want all URLs to be accessible from everywhere. The point of Hreflang is to indicate links across URLs; so hreflang makes IP-based redirection unnecessary.

If you really want to do IP-based redirection, do it on the x-default version of the page. And use the x-default version solely for redirection. For example, don't have your English version as the x-default and then redirect non-English users to other versions. If you do that, Germany-based crawlers won't ever be able to access your English URL.

[gfiorelli1]

The only valid redirection is the one based on user browser, not IP, IMHO.

However, if you want to use that kind of redirection for the home page (not the others pages), then that redirection should be working the first time, so that users can eventually choose to go to another version of the site they prefer (i.e.: I live in Spain and I go to domain.eu. When I travel in the US, I still want to go to domain.eu, not always being pushed to use domain.com).

Moreover, doing that, you will let crawlers to discover also the others version even though they were redirected to the one corresponding to their IP the first time. In other words, Googlebot (Mountain View, USA, IP), the first time will go always to domain.com, but once there it will able to discover also domain.eu and domain.co.uk from the versions selector, and it won't be redirected again to domain.com.

Said all this, the fact is that you want to target a political area (EU) with domain.eu, the world with domain.com and the UK with domain.co.uk.

This desire to target three different kind of geographies complicates everything :-).

The only solution I see is:

1. Domain.com set up as "global" >> hreflang="en". All users using English will see it in the SERPs despite of their location but in these cases (see point 2 and 3);

2. Domain.eu set up as the site for the European countries >> hreflang="en-ES" - hreflang="en-IT" - hreflang="en-DE" and so on.

3. Domain.co.uk set up as the site for Great Britain >> hreflang="en-GB".

Doing this and implementing the hreflang in the canonical URLs of the sites and referencing only canonical URLs of the others sites (apart having the self-referral hreflang), then you should be safe.

However, remember that with those hreflang, people searching in another language than English will never (or almost never) see your sites but for brand name searches or very specific brand + product queries.

Therefore, I am still of the idea that having only English websites for targeting the world means missing a huge business opportunity.