International Blog Structure & Hreflang Tags

[MattBassos]

Hi all,

I'm running an international website across 5 regions using a correct hreflang setup.

A problem I think I have is that my blog structure is not standardized and also uses hreflang tags for each blog article.

This has naturally caused Google to index each of the pages across each region, meaning a massive amount of pages are being crawled.

I know hreflang solves and issues with duplication penalties, but I have another question.

If I have legacy blog articles that are considered low quality by Google, is that counting against my site once or multiple times for each time the blog is replicated across each region? I'm not sure if hreflang is something that would tell Google this.

For example, if I have low quality blog posts:

blog/en-us/low-quality-article-1 
blog/en-gb/low-quality-article-1 
blog/en-ca/low-quality-article-1

Do you think Google is counting this as 3 low quality articles or just 1 if hreflang is correctly implemented?

Any insights would be great because I'm considering to cull the international setup of the blog articles and use just /blog across each region.

[zeehj]

Hey there–assuming you've correctly implemented your hreflang tags (as alternate inks in your head codes, see example below) then Googlebot should not see these as duplicates of each other.

It's hard for me to weigh in on the other element of your question, "my blog structure is not standardized," without examples. How are you differentiating your international content in your URL structures?

Another question: are these blog articles actually localized? Meaning, is there custom content (e.g. events in X location) or differences (e.g. spelling conventions) for these regions? If not, you may not even need these international versions of your blog content if it's not being translated.