Can a Global Website Rely on Browser Settings for Translation?

[NikelleClark]

Our website serves a global market and over a year ago, we launched 8 language variations of the site and implemented hreflang tags.

These language variation pages are proving difficult to maintain, and in Search Console they're triggering thousands of errors. I have double checked our implementation and it's not perfect, so I understand the errors.

Here's the question though... the 8 language variations of the site are receiving less than 1% of our web traffic despite 40% of our web traffic coming from countries outside of North America every month. I want to know if we can eliminate the headache of these 8 language variations altogether, remove our attempt at hreflang, and simply rely on the browser settings of the user to dictate what language the website appears in for them?

If not, is there a simpler solution than hreflang and attempting to maintain a very large website in 8 languages?

Thank for your input!

Niki

[DmitriiK]

Howdy.

Hreflangs implementation works along with browser settings. So, getting rid of hreflangs and rely on browser settings alone will not fix your problems.

I wonder if all those errors have something to do with your hreflangs not working properly.

Other than that, you can use IPs for "helping" browsers to determine the location. You can use suggestive popup or banner for languages etc like:

1. Examine the Accept headers sent by the browser.
2. Use IP geolocation to determine the user's location and guess an appropriate language.
3. Force the user to explicitly select a language, as exemplified by Wikipedia.

Hope this helps.