Does your business have a multilanguage website Why do you operate in different countries or regions of the world? If the answer is yes, know what is the hreflang tagyou are very interested.
It is likely that the home of your web page, some category or product page has different pages, depending on whether the content is focused on different countries. We put the typical case for your home. Imagine that you have a home for Spain, another for France and another for Argentina. It is possible that between Argentina and Spain there are some differences, but being the same language they have very similar content. Then Google can detect it as duplicate content and that is something we want to avoid at all costs. Imagine for example, that you want to mark content in German for any country in the world, or maybe you have the case of wanting to mark content in English only for British users.
What solution does Google offer us for this? The response is rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”
What is the hreflang tag?
This label that gets within the Head section of your page and tells Google the specific language of the same and to which region that content is destined. Useful, huh? We can think of other cases in which you can use it.
For example, my website has a home page for Spain and another for users in France. Or it may also be the case that I am interested in having different pages for different countries in the same language. The latter may be one page for Spain and another for Colombia.
Why is it important for your website?
Insert this tag in your site, it has different functions, all of them in benefit of our website. It will not only have to do with what Google sees once it has passed through our page, but also with the perception of our own users about it:
- First of all it will help us indicate to Google the language and territory of our contentwhich will allow improve positioning of our page in the indicated country. In case you have a web page that intends to position itself in several languages and territories, if you have not placed the hreflang attribute for each region, SEO will focus on a specific language, leaving the rest of them unnoticed by Google.
- Second benefit, removing duplicate content, something Google doesn’t like at all. It’s very simple, if you have similar pages, Google can identify them as duplicate content. This label will serve to tell Google that It is not duplicate content, but rather it is aimed at different countries.
- Offering the user the content of our website in their native language will undoubtedly be a factor that It will improve the experience during navigation. It can even help us reduce the bounce rate and increase our permanence on the page.
How to implement hreflang tag?
Once you know the possibilities of using this tag on your website, the time has come to get down to work and start learning about it. how to implement it on your website. We give you the step by step to carry it out. ¡we start!
Select the pages in several languages
Go to the group of pages that have a different language or region. For example your home is called example.com and has example.com/de with content in German, regardless of which country in the world (Germany or Austria), example.com/en-gb with content in English for UK users and example.com/de-es with content in German for users from Spain.
Add the label in the different versions
You have to put the rel=”alternate”hreflang tag indicating the different versions. The same labels should go on all the pages that have the same content, that is, if my website has three homes, it should have the same label on all the homes, which will consist of three parts, one for each country.
Specifies the hreflang of each country
This tag has two parts that identify the language() and, optionally, the region() of an alternate URL. Examples:
- de: Content in German, regardless of region.
- en-GB: Content in English for British users.
- de-ES: Content in German for users from Spain.
That is, if we only fill in one field of the hreflang we are saying the content language, regardless of region. For example, if I put the following code, in the case of my home (example.com/de) it would be indicating that http://example.com/de serves content in German for any country in the world, Germany or Austria.
In the other two cases, the first value specifies the language and the second the territory. So in the previous example, the label that we see below, for my home (example.com/de-es) would be specifying that it is content in English language, intended for the United Kingdom territory.
For my home (example.com/de-es), the following tag would be specifying that it is content in German language, intended for the Spanish territory.
What happens for country selector pages?
For example, in the case of my home example.com, it has the typical world map where you can select the country. The following tag would be inserted:
Be careful throughout the process
Labeling must be carried out with some caution, always paying attention to the correct form for each language or territory. If there was some kind of error, WebmasterTools would take care of notifying us.
Monitor the changes experienced
In Google Analytics You should monitor the variation of traffic from the target country to the pages where you have inserted this tag, with the intention of checking if significant changes have been registered. It is convenient to monitor, if the amount of duplicate content on your website has been improved, as well as the positioning itself in each of the regions that you are working on your website.
Doubts questions? Are you ready to conquer the world? Since we work on for some of our web projects. Improve the organic positioning of your company in each of the regions where you are operating and reach your potential customers more easily. Contact us if you need more information.
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