Multilingual SEO for voice searches: Comprehensive guide
30-second summary: Search engines are laser-focused on improving user experience and voice search plays an increasingly key role With 100+ global languages, people are prone to searching in their native language How do you optimize your website for multilingual search while keeping a natural and conversational tone? Atul Jindal accurately guides you through the process […]
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What’s technical SEO? 8 technical aspects everyone should know
An SEO Basics post about technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but here we’ll explain – in layman’s language – […]
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How to get international insights from Google Analytics
Google Analytics is powerful but the sheer volume of data available can make finding usable insights tough. 10 tips for using it for international SEO.
The post How to get international insights from Google Analytics appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
On-site SEO for international brands, do’s and don’ts
Do’s and don’t of how best to do SEO for your international sites. Everything from details of keyword search to implementing “hreflang” with HTML tags, HTTP headers, and Sitemap.
Six Hreflang tag pitfalls to watch out for on e-commerce websites
When taking a website international, one of the most important technical SEO elements to get right is the Hreflang tag. When you … read more
An hreflang example and how to test it
There are multiple ways to implement hreflang. Perhaps your content management system supports it, or you are using a plugin or extension to add hreflang in any way to your pages. No matter how you implement them, it’s obviously good that you do! hreflang is the glue that binds pages that are the same except for […]
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Coming soon: Multilingual SEO training
February 7, 2018, marks the release of a brand new course in the Yoast Academy: Multilingual SEO. The Multilingual SEO training is for every site owner, developer or SEO who targets people in various locales and languages. The time-limited introductory price will be $169. After a week, it will go to its regular price of […]
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What is multilingual SEO?
If your online business is doing well in your country, you might consider expanding to international markets. To be successful in new markets requires some extra investments in SEO though. You’d better start thinking about multilingual SEO, if you want to be sure your website will be found and used well in other countries! Here, […]
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Ask Yoast: Avoiding duplicate content for multi-regional sites
If you’re a bit familiar with the ways of SEO, you’ll be aware that duplicate content is a problem that can happen to anyone and could seriously harm your rankings. But in some cases, it’s difficult to know where you stand. For example: if you translate your existing content into a different language, it isn’t […]
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How to scale your business internationally on search engines
Most online sites at some stage will want to expand, and one of the most common ways to do that is by … read more
Ask Yoast: Publishing in another language and SEO
If you’re creating content for a website, you might want to, occasionally, publish an article in a language different from the language of your other content. However, it’s difficult to rank with one specific article that’s written in a language that differs from the rest. So what should you do to improve the SEO of that article? In this […]
Ready to go global? Check your hreflang tags
According to the latest SEMrush research, 75% of the websites that use hreflangs get them wrong. This article explains how you can diagnose and fix the most common hreflang issues.
Post from Alexandra Nedorezova
HREFbuilder: Making HREFlang sitemaps a little bit easier
Read our review of the HREFbuilder tool which is designed to help you generate correct HREFlang sitemaps for your international and multilingual websites.
Post from Barry Adams
Use hreflang for multilingual websites
The hreflang tag is used to tell Google and other search engines the language used on a specific page on your website. Search engines use the hreflang tag to ‘redirect’ the visitor to the page in the right language. Hreflang is also referred to as rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”. When I was discussing post subjects with our site…
This post first appeared on Yoast. Whoopity Doo!
Creating the Right Homepage for your International Users
If you are doing business in more than one country or targeting different languages, we recommend having separate sites or sections with specific content on each URLs targeted for individual countries or languages. For instance one page for US and english-speaking visitors, and a different page for France and french-speaking users. While we have information on handling multi-regional and multilingual sites, the homepage can be a bit special. This post will help you create the right homepage on your website to serve the appropriate content to users depending on their language and location.
There are three ways to configure your homepage / landing page when your users access it:
- Show everyone the same content.
- Let users choose.
- Serve content depending on users’ localization and language.
Let’s have a look at each in detail.
Show users worldwide the same content
In this scenario, you decide to serve specific content for one given country and language on your homepage / generic URL (http://www.example.com). This content will be available to anyone who accesses that URL directly in their browser or those who search for that URL specifically. As mentioned above, all country & language versions should also be accessible on their own unique URLs.
Note: You can show a banner on your page to suggest a more appropriate version to users from other locations or with different language settings.
Let users choose which local version and which language they want
In this configuration, you decide to serve a country selector page on your homepage / generic URL and to let users choose which content they want to see depending on country and language. All users who type in that URL can access the same page.
If you implement this scenario on your international site, remember to use the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for the country selector page, which was specifically created for these kinds of pages. The x-default value helps us recognize pages that are not specific to one language or region.
Automatically redirect users or dynamically serve the appropriate HTML content depending on users’ location and language settings
A third scenario would be to automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content.
Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users.
Note: Think about redirecting users for whom you do not have a specific version. For instance, French-speaking users on a website that has English, Spanish and Chinese versions. Show them the content that you consider the most appropriate.
Whatever configuration you decide to go with, you should make sure all the pages – including country and language selector pages:
- Have rel-alternate-hreflang annotations.
- Are accessible for Googlebot’s crawling and indexing: do not block the crawling or indexing of your localized pages.
- Always allow users to switch local version or language: you can do that using a drop down menu for instance.
Reminder: As mentioned in the beginning, remember that you must have separate URLs for each country and language version.
About rel-alternate-hreflang annotations
Remember to annotate all your pages – whatever method you choose. This will greatly help search engines to show the right results to your users.
Country selector pages and redirecting or dynamically serving homepages should all use the x-default hreflang, which was specifically designed for auto-redirecting homepages and country selectors.
Finally, here are a few useful reminders about rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in general:
- Your annotations must be confirmed from the other pages. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise, your annotations may not be interpreted correctly.
- Your annotations should be self-referential. Page A should use rel-alternate-hreflang annotation linking to itself.
- You can specify the rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in the HTTP header, in the head section of the HTML, or in a sitemap file. We strongly recommend that you choose only one way to implement the annotations, in order to avoid inconsistent signals and errors.
- The value of the hreflang attribute must be in ISO 639-1 format for the language, and in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for the region. Specifying only the region is not supported. If you wish to configure your site only for a country, use the geotargeting feature in Webmaster Tools.
Following these recommendations will help us better understand your localized content and serve more relevant results to your users in our search results. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the internationalization Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analysts.
When to Use HREFLANG
It can be confusing to know when and how to implement the hreflang meta tag for international geotargeted content. Kate Morris explains the ins and outs.
Post from Kate Morris on State of Search
When to Use HREFLANG
3 Reasons Why Deploying Hreflang Shouldn’t Be An Auto-Reflex!
I apologize for talking yet again about hreflang — but there is an important point I really want to make for those working in geo-targeting. For some, “hreflang” is becoming an auto-reflex, and that’s definitely not helping their international success. Allow me to explain…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
Using the X-Default Hreflang Tag For Multinational SEO: Default Language Opportunities
Google & Yandex announced the new x-default hreflang tag earlier this month, and in doing so closed the final gap in executing ‘perfect’ SEO platforms for multinational brands. There is, however, the question of what language content to use as your default, and how you can bring a little…
Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.
X-default HREFLANG – making localisation so much simpler
Very interested to read this morning that Google have announced that the HREFLANG framework has been expanded to include a fallback default in situations which is supported by both Google and Yandex. If we take the following example – sitex.com – Default Country Selector page – sitex.com/gb/en – For users in the UK speaking English […]
Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages
Webmaster Level: All
The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language. Today we’ll introduce a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that the webmaster can use to specify such homepages that is supported by both Google and Yandex.
To see this in action, let’s look at an example. The website example.com has content that targets users around the world as follows:
- http://example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
- http://example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
- http://example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
- http://example.com/: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide
In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using rel-alternate-hreflang using Sitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />
The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited. For example, it would be the page our algorithms try to show French-speaking searchers worldwide or English-speaking searchers on google.ca.
The same annotation applies for homepages that dynamically alter their contents based on a user’s perceived geolocation or the Accept-Language headers. The x-default hreflang value signals to our algorithms that such a page doesn’t target a specific language or locale.
As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst
