Indexing problem

Hi Mapea82,

The question is whether reindexing the US URLs is that much more important to you than indexing the international URLs. If it isn't that critical, you might just want to wait it out. Here's my thinking:

If your en-US pages are your main pages, but they're also hreflang linked, blocking them would have thrown a double spanner in Google's understanding of your site. First, you'd have lost your canonical US pages. Second, as you know, hreflang defines alternative versions of each US page for other languages that are "switched" into the search results for users in other languages. All the international pages are also standalone pages that rank in their own right... so if you blocked the US pages, my guess is that the whole hreflang implementation would have fallen over and Google would have searched among the others and picked those as de-facto US canonicals instead - hence the result you saw. If it's all put back exactly as it was, and all the tagging is correct, my inclination would be to leave it exactly as it is and do nothing. What you want is for Google to recrawl and "reunderstand" the true US canonicals and how all the international canonicals relate through hreflang. IMHO, the more workarounds and fiddles you put in place, the more you're likely to frustrate this process. Noindexing and things of that sort seem to me to be a further backward step - they take you even more out of the index. It's going to take time for Google to figure out the proper canonicals again and the hreflang mechanism - so I think just leave it and be patient.

However, if it is super critical to get those US URLs back in searches, and you're willing to sacrifice your international indexing, what are your options?

- I can noindex the international URLs
Noindexing can take a while. So this is going to take time to work through and maybe you're as well to wait for the thing to right itself? I'm not sure I'd recommend this.

- I can add canonical tags to the URLs having them point to the en-us pages

Hmmm. In the normal hreflang setup, each international page is its own canonical version in that language. Canonicalizing might work if the content is very similar, but the pages are also surely different by definition... so it might not work? The canonicals might just be ignored.

- Temporarily block international sites from the search console - using the URL removal tool

Well that will temporarily remove the international versions from searches, but it won't put the correct versions in their place. Maybe it's better that something is shown in searches rather than nothing?

A really drastic option would be to 301 redirect all your international pages back to the corresponding US pages. That will essentially torpedo your international setup, but it should get the US version working fairly quickly. There might also be a case for 302 redirecting here?

So I think my advice would be:

1) If there's no incredible hurry, sit out and wait for Google to figure it all out again.

2) If it's super-urgent, consider redirecting all the international URLs onto the US URLs and, once it's all indexed again, break those redirects and set up your international versions once again?

Hreflang is a mechanism for showing alternate language URLs, so as long as something is showing for your site in a search result, you're halfway there: you have a foot in the door and a placeholder. Any solution that removes your site entirely from searches is not really helping. Does your site offer users the manual option of going from (say) the Spanish page back to the US page by clicking a flag or whatever? If so, I think I would be even more inclined to sit it out and wait for it to correct itself.

After the 70th that it shows, Google will say, some pages were omitted. And gives you the option of running the search with all the results showing.

So, run the search again, go to the last page, click on "repeat the search with the omitted results included" and see what that gives you.