Traffic drop after hreflang tags added

[seoelevated]

No, that's not a correct x-default implementation. It should point to the same URL on both sites. Wherever the non-specified locales should go (pick one).

As far as reciprocal, Google checks that they are "reciprocal" in that each locale which is pointed to has hreflang tags which point back to the other site for its locale. There is no point in having hreflang tags only on one site.

And, you definitely shouldn't specify just "EN" because that would include the US too.

[moon-boots]

No, that's not a correct x-default implementation. It should point to the same URL on both sites. Wherever the non-specified locales should go (pick one).

The issue here is that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are redirected to the US site, while EU countries are redirected to the UK site. If I select one of the two, then won't all countries listed above be directed to the UK site?

[seoelevated]

So, that's exactly why I wrote that you should include all the EU countries as specified locales, pointing to the EU site. Only everything "unspecified" goes to x-default. Alternatively, you could point AU, CA, NZ to the US site, and make x-default point to your EU site. I don't think that is as good of an approach though. Like I said, everyone who has a EU site has this issue. It's a pain that EU isn't a valid "locale" for hreflang. Maybe something will eventually be in place to handle better. In the interim, we can add hreflang for all the EU countries (or just prioritize the markets you really serve).

[moon-boots]

This is just getting overly complicated, Google need a more elegant solution.

I will try to add each of the EU countries to the EU site and ROW to the USA site. Is this how it should look?

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

[seoelevated]

moon-boots. Pretty close now. You should add the x-default to each site too, and they should be identical (whichever one of your sites you want to present for any locales you've omitted).

But also, realize that "en-it" is a pretty fringe locale. Google woudl only propose this to a search visitor from Italy who happened to have preferences set for English in their browser. While there are plenty of people in ITaly who do speak English, there are far fewer who set their browser to "en".

I have the same issue in Europe. Germany is one of our largest markets. I initially targeted, like you've done, just English in each country. We previously (a year ago) had a German-language site, and that one we targeted to "de-de". When we stopped maintaining the German-language site, we changed our hreflang tag to "en-de". We quickly found that all of our rankings dropped off a cliff in Germany. I would recommend, at least for your largest addressable markets, to also include hreflang tags for the primary languages. Thsi is another thing whcih Google hasn't yet made easy. They allow to target by language without country, but not by country without language. At least in hreflang (which was really developed for language targeting). GSC (the legacy version) had country-level targeting there.

Lastly, you included URLs for your home page here. But I'm assuming you realize you need to make the tags page-specific, on every page. If you put these tags as-is on every page, then you would be sending a signal to google equivalent to pointing every one of your site pages to a canonical of your home page (and effectively de-indexing the remainder of your site's pages). I'm assuming you're just using home page as an example in your posts. But if not, then yes, you will need to do page-specific tags for each page (and the self-referencing ones need to match your canonical tag for the page).

[moon-boots]

Okay, I think I have it down correctly now:

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

How does that look?

Yes, I was just using my home page as an example. Each page references its own URL, as opposed to every page referencing the home page URL - but thank you for pointing that out as it could have been easily overlooked!

[seoelevated]

Moon boots. It looks like you decided to target by language, rather than by country-language combinations. And that is acceptible. It has a few issues, for example if you target by FR you are going to send both France and Candaian French speakers to your Europe site (and I don't think you are wanting to do this). On the other hand, if you were instead thinking that you were specifying the country code, no, the code you pasted here does not do that. Per the spec on hreflang, you can specify a language code without a country code, but you cannot specify a country code without a language code. All of the hreflang values you used will be interpreted as language, not country. So, for example, CA will be interpreted as Catalan, not Canada.

Again, I know it's a giant pain to handle all the EU countries. All of us wish Google made it feasible to target Europe as an entity, or at least target y country even. But it's just not the case. Yet. So, the way we do this is generally with application code. Ideally, in your case, I would suggest for that code to generate, for each country, one entry for English in that country (like "en-DE"), and another entry for the most common language in the country (like "de-DE"). That will generate many entries. But it's the only way I know of to effectively target Europe with an English language site.

[moon-boots]

I think I understand, this is going to generate a lot of tags - this could be a problem for website speed.

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

I'll see how the above goes, I can always add an English version as you suggest, but I think I have targetted the main languages here and hopefully the x-default will resolve the rest.

[seoelevated]

Yes, that looks correct now. And in your specific case, x-default might indeed handle the rest since Europe is your default, and that's where the unspecified combinations are most likely to be for you.

I wouldn't be too concerned about site speed. These are just links. They don't load any resources or execute any scripts. For most intents, it's similar to text. The main difference is that they will be links that may be followed by the bots. But really, even though you'll have many lines, you only really have two actual links among them. So, I wouldn't be too concerned about this part.

Good luck.

[moon-boots]

Thank you! Hopefully this resolves my issue

[iamharoldadams]

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