Getting hreflang Right: Examples and Insights for International SEO

Most of us will remember the days in SEO where geotargeting was nearly impossible, and we all crawled to the shining example of Apple.com as our means of showcasing what the correct search display behaviour should be. Well, most of us weren’t Apple, and it was extremely difficult to determine how to structure your site to make it work for international search. Hreflang has been a blessing to the SEO industry, even though it’s had a bit of a troubled past. 

There’s been much confusion as to how hreflang annotations should work, what is the correct display behaviour, and if the implementation requires additional configuration such as the canonical tag or WMT targeting.

This isn’t a beginner- or even intermediate-level post, so if you don’t have a solid feel for hreflang already, I’d recommend reading through 
Google’s documentation before diving in.

In today’s post we’re going to cover the following:

1. How to check international SERPs the right way
2. What should hreflang do and not do
3. Examples of hreflang behaviour
4. Important tools for the serious international SEO
5. Tips from my many screw-ups, and successes 

Section 1: How to check international SERPs the right way

I’ve said this once, and I’ll say it again: Know your Google search parameters better than your mother. Half the time we think something isn’t working, we don’t actually know how to check. Shy of having an IP in every country from which you want to check Google results, here is the next best thing:

For example, if want to mimic a Spanish user in the US:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=es&gl=us&pws=0&q=seo

Or if I want to impersonate an Australian user:

http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&gl=au&pws=0&q=seo

If you want a full list of language/country codes that Google uses, please visit the 
Google CCTLDs language and reference sheet. If you want the Google docs version go here, or if you want a tool to do this for you, check out Isearchfrom.

Section 2: What should hreflang do and not do

hreflang will not:

1. Replace geo-ranking factors: Just because you rank #1 in the US for “blue widgets” does not mean that your UK “blue widgets page” will rank #1 in the UK.
2. Fix duplicate content issues: If you have duplicate copies of your pages targeting the same keywords, it does not mean that the right country version will rank because of hreflang. The same rules apply to general SEO; when there are exact or nearly exact duplicates, Google will choose which page to rank. Typically, we see the version with more authority ranking (authority can be determined loosely by #links, TBPR, DA, PA, etc.).

You might be wondering about duplicate content and Panda, which is a valid concern. I personally haven’t seen or heard of any site with international duplicate content being affected by Panda updates. The sites I have analyzed always had some sort of international SEO configuration, however, whether it was WMT targeting or hreflang annotations.

Hreflang will:

1. Help the right country/language version of your cross-annotated pages appear in the correct versions of *google.*

Section 3: Examples of hreflang behaviour

Case 1: CNN.com

Configuration:

hreflang, 302 redirect on homepage, and subdomain configuration

Sample of hreflang annotations:

What should happen according to the targeting?

Cnn.com is seen in EN-US and any Spanish queries should display Mexico.cnn.com

What actually happens?

https://www.ridgid.com/
			

My secret sauce is 
Nerdydata.com, and if you didn’t know about this beautiful site, I hope that Nerdydata.com gives me a free t-shirt or something for telling you.

I find most SEOs who know about the tool are using it for useless stuff like meta tags (this is my own opinion), but what it really should be used for is reverse engineering things like hreflang and schema.org to find working examples. For example, a footprint you might use is hreflang=”en-us” and you’ll find a tonne of examples.

Here’s a few to get you started:

That’s it folks, hopefully you’ve learned a thing or two. Good luck in your international adventures and 
feel free to say hi on Twitter. 🙂