Does hreflang help international SEO?

[TWDCEMEASEO]

I have a very large US based website and series of European sites which are very new and therefore have very limited inherent equity. my US collegues have suggested using alternate language headers:

In my opinion this should significantly help the SEO of the new European sites. Does anyone have any experience with this tag?

Thanks for your help in advance

[antonradev]

Hello there, Danielle!

I have done lot of testing, examines and checks and  in my opinion hrefllang is not an attribute that is under any value for source code metrics in the website pages.

Some basic meta data is a good idea and maybe this  you mentioned.

But focus on the pages markers like your content language:

Titles, great no spelling errors texts, images and video descriptions, Street Addresses and codes, phone numbers, people names, mentioned in the contents, Maps.

What most matters for me is the content itself in your pages and i always focus on this. hreflang or meta datas have never helped me at all.

As a additional todo for you, I can mention local external links, pointing to viral local clean country resources.

And of course, we do not forget your Google Tools settings if your comain is not local .es domain.

Some really pro members can aggree with me or give more informational for you.

Good luck!

[Hannah_Smith]

Hi Danielle,

There was a hangout with Pierre Far which might be helpful to you - https://plus.google.com/115984868678744352358/posts/9zA3a96XahN

There he speaks pretty extensively about how to implement this.

I guess it's important to note that this tag is designed for use when you have duplicate content - e.g. the same content in English for say UK / US / Australia etc and/or translated content e.g. English content, French content etc.

My understanding is that if your content isn't duplicate - i.e. you have unique content for each market then the use of this tag isn't appropriate.

I'm also not sure if this will help your less established international sites in real terms - I'm guessing that the issue might be that they lack the raw link strength to rank as opposed to it being a geo-targeting issue.

I hope this helps,

Hannah

[Seaward-Group]

I currently have a US and UK site and I'm looking at merging the two sites and using

example.com/ = uk content
example.com/us = us content

The content is pretty much identical with spelling corrections and currency/price differences. I am looking at setting up HREFLANG.

I am being advised by our developers to create completely different US to UK content because Google looks at Bings trending of our site, so penalty for the duplicated content in Bing will reduce our Google ranking, I've never come across this, is this sound advice?

[RyanKent]

Google looks at Bings trending of our site, so penalty for the duplicated content in Bing will reduce our Google ranking

I have never heard anything like this suggested. Bing and Google are competitors. They may look to each other for ideas, but it is highly unlikely either search engine uses any information from their competitor as a basis for ranking or duplicate content determinations.

If your UK content is at the site's root and the US content is in the /us folder, then you have a clear separation of content. There are numerous distinctions between the US and UK content which can be helpful for both Bing and Google to properly index your content:

• use the meta language tag

• ensure each version of the page uses proper spelling. For example "specialize" vs "specialise"

• use the proper monetary units (pound vs dollar), measurements, and cultural references (king vs president), etc.

• you can geo-target your site sections in Webmaster Tools

• it would also be helpful for pages to earn links from their target audience. UK pages should ideally earn UK links, whereas US pages should earn US links.

[Hannah_Smith]

Google don't look at Bing for their results

About a year ago Google complained that Bing were copying their results - http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 - but really that's an aside.

That said, in an ideal world I would also still recommend (wherever possible) that completely different content is created for UK and US markets.

Partially to dodge the duplicate content bullet (although with href lang it looks like this isn't going to be so much of an issue any more); but mainly because there are a lot of differences between UK and US consumers. Although we both speak English, the English we speak, the way we search, the messaging we respond to is different.

Obviously the option to create separate content isn't open to everyone (budgets, resources, etc). As such, if you can't stretch to creating separate content for each market I'd probably go with the hreflang implementation.

However it is important to note that all that really deals with is the duplicate content - if your pages aren't strong enough then they still won't rank, so you'll need to think about building links to these pages too.

I hope this helps,

Hannah