How should I handle hreflang tags if it's the same language in all targeting countries?

[tcope25]

My company is creating an international version of our site at international.example.com. We are located in the US with our main site at www.example.com targeting US & Canada but offering slightly different products elsewhere internationally. Ideally, we would have hreflang tags for different versions in different languages, however, it's going to be an almost duplicate site besides a few different SKUs. All language and content on the site is going to be in English. Again, the only content changing is slightly different SKUs, they are almost identical sites. The subdomain is our only option right now. Should we implement hreflang tags even if both languages are English and only some of the content is different? Or will having just canonicals be fine? How should we handle this?

Would it make sense to use hreflang this way and include it on both versions? I believe this would be signaling for US & Canda visitors to visit our main site and all other users go to the international site. Am I thinking this correctly or should we be doing this a different way?

[danatanseo]

Hi tcope25,

Implementing rel="alternate" hreflang is likely one of the most complex, and most commonly incorrectly implemented elements for SEO. Just the example you've provided above would take about 30 minutes to talk through, clarify business needs, and then determine a course of action.

I normally don't push off answering a question, but I would highly recommend seeking out an SEO professional to help you sort this out. Tere's just a lot wrong with the proposed code above - sorry, not trying to be insulting, but helpful.

One real standout in your proposed code above that I would not recommend is to set your "x-default" to one of your secondary international sites. The "x-default" if used, should point to your strongest, primary version of your business sites. For example, if your English site in the US is your primary, most important site, then your "x-default" should the English US site URL.

Also based on your code above, it looks like you are serving the same content, via the same URLs to US and Canada searchers. If this is true , meaning you are not localising content for Canada and it is 100% the same page (I hope you aren't showing different content to US and Canada visitors via the same URL by attempting to use geo-location to decide what they see - that's a whole separate SEO issue) - then you don't need "en-us" and "en-ca" you just need "en" - But you would need to be sure that you haven't set your International Targeting in Google Search Console to "United States" - You need to leave the country targeting there unchecked.

This are very high level observations - I would recommend engaging a reliable SEO consultant to help make sure it's all implemented correctly.

[tcope25]

Thanks for your comments Dana! I do appreciate the time you took to help explain more about hreflang.

I have implemented hreflang on multiple other websites in different languages without any issues. However, this situation is a bit different. To answer your questions...yes, our main site is the English site in the US & Canada. Same exact site, URL, content. We want every other visitor in the world to visit our international subdomain.

If implemented the code below, what would happen if I searched our website brand in the US? Would our main site come up? What would happen to a searcher in France? Would Google serve our international site?

By your comments above are you suggesting the below?

[danatanseo]

Hi tcope25,

Thanks for the clarification, that helps me to understand better the end goal. To futher clarify, you say "we want every other visitor in the world to visit our international subdomain." Do you mean "every other [English speaking] visitor in the world." ? If so, I think your proposed code is close. It is now just missing a self-referencing element, so it should be:

Just keep in mind that even if your tags are perfect, if your English US site has significantly more authority, it may show up in international search results anyway as rel="alternate" hreflang is a signal, not a directive.

Hope that helps!

Dana