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Do I need hreflang tags?

by steveorg
4 replies
  • SEO
    • |
My site is structured somewhat like this:
mysite.com/en-us/producta
mysite.com/en-gb/producta
mysite.com/en-in/producta

I've been working on creating sitemaps with the hreflang tag. However, a provider of automated site map software told me that the hreflang tag is unnecessary because the language-country code (i.e. en-gb) is embedded in the URL and Google will recognize the intent for SEO. Is that true?

What about the hreflang tag's protection against duplicate content?
#hreflang #tags
  • Profile picture of the author zimmerseo
    Hi Steve,

    the hreflang tag is really only an instruction to Google to serve a specific page in a specific language depending on the searchers location.

    So if you have content in both German and English, depending on the searchers location, it will serve up one or the other.

    Duplicate content on websites with different country TLD's isn't a problem as they are created to cater to specific geographical locations.

    Hope that helps.
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    • Profile picture of the author habibkhan01
      Banned
      yes I also fully agree with zimmerseo

      ahref tag is just to locate the destination.
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      OP check your HTML source code for rel="alternate" that aren't for different languages. I've seen Google do some funky stuff with SERP titles/descriptions for things as simple as xml comment titles/descriptions being linked to from the <head> via rel="alternate".

      My point is, tidy up the <head> source code before targeting anything related to rel="alternate".
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      • Profile picture of the author steveorg
        Thanks all for your replies, but I think you are missing one of the use cases for hreflang. It's not only for different languages in different locations, but also for the same language in different locations. In the examples in my first post, it is for English in the US, India and Great Britain.

        An alternative to using HTML tags is using the hreflang tag in an XML site map. This is an example of one related page in a site map.
        Code:
        <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/en-us</loc>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.5</priority>
    <xhtml:link href="http://www.example.com/en-us" hreflang="x-default" rel="alternate" />
    <xhtml:link href="http://www.example.com/en-in" hreflang="en-in" rel="alternate" />
    <xhtml:link href="http://www.example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" rel="alternate" />
</url>
        As I understand it, the hreflang="x-default" is for the default page and rel="alternate" for the other links prevents those pages from being treated as duplicates.

        I'd appreciate rethinking of the replies to my first post in light of this use case.
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