What is the proper way to setup hreflang tags on my English and Spanish site?

[peteboyd]

I have a full English website at http://www.example.com and I have a Spanish version of the website at http://spanish.example.com but only about half of the English pages were translated and exist on the Spanish site.

Should I just add a sitemap to both sites with hreflang tags that point to the correct version of the page?

Is this a proper way to set this up? I was going to repeat this same process for all of the applicable URLs that exist on both versions of the website (English and Spanish).

Is it okay to have hreflang="es" or do I need to have a country code attached as well? There are many Spanish speaking countries and I don't know if I need to list them all out. For example hreflang="es-bo" (Bolivia), hreflang="es-cl" (Chile), hreflang="es-co" (Columbia), etc...

Sitemap example for English website URL:
<url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc></url>

Sitemap example for Spanish website URL:
<url><loc>http://spanish.example.com/</loc></url>

Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!

[TomVolpe]

Hi,

To answer your first question, using hreflang tags in your sitemaps is a perfectly fine implementation of the tags, they will work whether they’re coded into the of each page, set in the sitemap or set in HTTP headers. This page will be useful for you as it explains all three methods quite well: http://www.branded3.com/blogs/implementing-hreflang-tag/

But when you add them to your sitemap you should include all variations of the page, along with a default – so if a French or German searcher accesses your site, you can define whether they’ll be served the Spanish or English page, like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

To answer your second question about countries, you are fine to use hreflang=”es” to define all Spanish traffic, but using country codes can be useful in some circumstances. For instance if you have a site talking about football, you could use hreflang=”en-us” for a page which refers to the game as ‘soccer’ and use hreflang=”en-gb” for the page calling it ‘football’.

This Google Webmaster support post explains using both quite well under ‘Supported language values’ which I recommend you take a look at as well: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Hope that helps,

Tom

[peteboyd]

Thanks Tom for your input and feedback.

[gfiorelli1]

Sorry for viewing this just now... but - forgive me if I am wrong due to a bad understanding of the question - but I think Tom answer is not correct.

You are telling that your main site is in English, but that has also a Spanish subdomain with just half of it localized in Spanish.

If this is the correct interpretation of the origin of your doubts, than, in the Spanish subdomain the hreflang should be implemented so:

IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH SPANISH CONTENT

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH ENGLISH CONTENT

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

Why? Because those "en" and "es" mean "English Language" and "Spanish Language", so you cannot declare as Spanish something that Spanish is not. As well you cannot declare both URLs as to shown to English speaking users, because that would create an hiccup to Google, who would not know what of the two it has to finally show to English speaking users.

More over, if you don't want to extend the use of the hreflang suggesting also the countries where to show some given URL, then you should canonicalize the spanish.domain.com URL with English content to the original www.domain.com URL.

The idea of using also the country code ISO could solve - somehow - this issue, because writing something like this:

<loc>http://www.example.com/</loc>

Then you will be telling Google to show the spanish.domain.com URL to the people using english in Spain (Google.es), and the English one to all the people speaking English in the rest of world.

Be aware, though, that Spanish people using Spanish will see in the www.domain.com URL in their Google.es SERPs, because the x-default is telling Google that all the people not using the language indicated in the hreflang="x-X" annotation (which is English), will have to see the main domain URL, and not the spanish subdomain one.

Hreflang is quite a sudoku, but it is extremely logic.