Hreflag Tags - English language & multiple regions

[J_Sinclair]

My client is concerned about duplicate content on their site which has versions of the same page in multiple regions. All pages are english language and the regions are; Asia, North America, Australia, Europe, UK and Rest of the World. The url just changes the location to a folder e.g. .com/australia

My question is does anyone have any recommendations on how to handle this for Europe, Asia and Rest of the World? Any thoughts would be appreciated

[GastonRiera]

Hello Jaimie,

In my opinion, I believe that your client should use hreflang tags with just language codes to capture all countries. Because there is no lannguage code for the whole Continent.
Or just create a page for every country you'd like to rank for.

Here a few resources to help you more:
Hreflang generator - Aleyda Solis International SEO - Moz Learning Center The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! - Moz Blog The International SEO Checklist - Moz Blog

Best Luck!
GR.

[J_Sinclair]

Thanks Gaston, appreciate the response. I was pretty sure that'd be the case but good to get another opinion!

[gfiorelli1]

First of all, you must ask your client if she target different regions like continents for some reason related to her business.

If not, then going multilingual is the best solution that trying to geotarget countries... also because, as Gaston wrote already, you cannot geotarget anything but nations: no continents, no political or economic states unions (like the UE).

If there's some justified business reason why the client needs to specify different versions for different large areas, then things can be weird, but there's a way to do it: using as many hreflang annotations as they are the countries present in a bigger geo area and targeted by a specific website.

Remember, in fact, that an URL can be annotated with as many hreflang annotations as needed.

i.e.: the www.domain.com targets Italy, UK and France with its English version but not other states for whatever reason (so not able to use simply hreflang="en") and Spain with the Spanish one, then its hreflang will be:

<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/" hreflang="es-ES"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-GB"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-IT"></rel="alternate">

<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-FR"></rel="alternate">

(I know it would be better to create an Italian and French version too, but this was just an example to give you an idea of what I was saying).