Hfreflang annotation query

[AdiRste]

Hi guys,

I'd love to hear your opinion on how to handle this. We have a www.site.com business site. We expanded our business to Italy a few years ago with an Italian ccTLD with a www.site.it version.

A business decision has been made to expand in to several new territories, but we will be going with a subdirectory structure for each country: .com/se, .com/fi etc

When we're setting up the hreflang tags for this, the language/region all need to be cross annotated. This is all fine. The only anomaly is the site.it version already existing. This site will continue to exist as it suits its market context so well. In terms of annotation, should the hreflang include the .it site or is the ccTLD the only signal google needs to serve the correct version to Italian searchers.But the hreflang tag needs to declare all available language versions and it is possible to include different domains etc.

Please let me know your thoughts on this My gut feeling is that it should be included? Thanks!

[DirkC]

Hi

The way you want to implement seems to be correct - not sure however if I would add the country to the language (although most Swedish people live in Sweden - you might want to attract all the Swedish speakers to the swedish version of your site rather than the en version) - so I would rather use hreflang="se"

If you implement it - you can always try and check a few url's to see if it's ok using this tool

rgds,

Dirk

[AdiRste]

Hi Dirk

Thanks for your response.

We do actually want to specify country also for currency and licensing reasons. But I get your point, we could certainly have generic language non region specific tagging also. For example we have a hrefleng="en" for the .com but will also want "en-CA" for Canadian specific currency and licencing.

Thanks

[DirkC]

In that case it's indeed better to keep the country specific language version

[gfiorelli1]

The answer given by Dirk is correct.

In the hreflang annotations you can indicate whatever URL, no matter it is on a subdomain or different domain name.