Setting Hreflang for Success #Pubcon

#HREFLANGSUCCESS BY @ALEYDA FROM #ORAINTI AT @PUBCON
Setting Hreﬂang For Success

Targeting international search audiences can be a
great way to grow and diversify your business…

However, it’s critical
to rank with the
relevant international
Web version in search
results… which can
be challenging when
you have many of
them

These misaligned pages will have worse rankings,  
CTR and conversions than the correct ones
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE

This is when Hreﬂang comes to the rescue
HTTPS://SUPPORT.GOOGLE.COM/WEBMASTERS/ANSWER/189077?HL=EN

hreﬂang is one of
many signals that
Google take into
consideration to
determine a target
locale, and one that
we can directly set

Hreﬂang allows to specify each of your pages  
language & alternatively country targeting
English for the UK
brand.com
brand.co.uk
brand.com/es/
English for the US
Spanish for the US

Nonetheless,
Hreﬂang is
usually found
to be hard to
implement…

For real

Sigh. Even when you think you had set it right already!

* SEO Consultant & Founder at Orainti
* SEO Speaker at +100 Events in +20 countries
* Author “SEO. Las Claves Esenciales.”
*Blogger in Search Engine Land & Search Engine Journal
*Featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Hufﬁngton Post
*European Search Personality of the Year in 2018
I’m Aleyda Solis, International SEO Consultant
ORAINTI.COM

I’ve had the chance to help some great brands…

… today I’m excited to share with you how to set
hreﬂang for success

It’s about following an implementation process
ASSESS THE LANGUAGES
AND COUNTRIES
HREFLANG
IMPLEMENTATION SCOPE
CHOOSE THE HREFLANG
IMPLEMENTATION
METHOD
SPECIFY THE HREFLANG
CODE PATTERN
MONITOR AND
TROUBLESHOOT THE
HREFLANG
IMPLEMENTATION AFTER
LAUNCH
VALIDATE THE
HREFLANG
IMPLEMENTATION IN A
TEST ENVIRONMENT
ESTABLISH HREFLANG
BEST PRACTICES
GUIDELINES TO FOLLOW
WHEN A NEW PAGE IS
PUBLISHED
HTTP://BIT.LY/HREFLANGPROCESS
1 2 3
6 5 4

1ASSESS THE LANGUAGES AND COUNTRIES
HREFLANG IMPLEMENTATION SCOPE

Although you might want to tag all of your international
Web versions, if you have many it’s critical to prioritize

Check for which of
your site versions
you’re attracting
rankings from
countries that
you’re already
targeting with
others
GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE AND GOOGLE ANALYTICS

Start with
those
countries
generating
more organic
trafﬁc to the
wrong site
version
SEMRUSH, AHREFS, SISTRIX

#HREFLANGSUCCESS BY @ALEYDA FROM #ORAINTI AT @PUBCONSEMRUSH, AHREFS, SISTRIX
Identify for which
queries the site
version ranks in the
wrong market

Check if these
queries are also
targeted w/
pages in the
relevant country
version that
should be
ranking instead

Create a priority hreﬂang list with those pages shown in
the wrong search results and their alternate versions

2CHOOSE THE HREFLANG IMPLEMENTATION
METHOD

You can implement hreﬂang annotations through the
HTML head, using XML sitemaps, or HTTP headers
HTML Head XML Sitemap

Choose the method that will better comply w/ your
needs and potential platform restrictions
BETTER FOR SMALL
NUMBER OF VERSIONS
TO TAG AND WHEN
USING A PLATFORM
THAT ALLOWS TO EASILY
EDIT THE HTML HEAD
HTML Head
BETTER FOR BIGGER
SITES WITH A HIGH
NUMBER OF VERSIONS
TO TAG AND/OR WHEN
YOU CAN’T EDIT YOUR
HTML HEAD
XML Sitemap
WHEN SPECIFYING
HREFLANG FOR NON-
HTML DOCUMENTS LIKE
PDFS, DOCS, ETC.
HTTP Header

3SPECIFY THE HREFLANG CODE PATTERN

#HREFLANGSUCCESS BY @ALEYDA FROM #ORAINTI AT @PUBCONHTTPS://SUPPORT.GOOGLE.COM/WEBMASTERS/ANSWER/189077?HL=EN
Hreﬂang annotations use ISO 639-1 values for  
languages and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 for countries

This is
incorrect since
the ISO 3166-1
code for the
UK is “GB”

Languages can be speciﬁed by themselves but when
specifying countries they should also include a language

Like this! Note the usage of a dash (not underscore)  
to separate the language and country values
<link rel=“alternate” hreﬂang=“en” href=“http://www.brand.com/“ />
<link rel=“alternate” hreﬂang=“en-us” href=“http://www.brand.com/" />
ENGLISH
ENGLISH IN THE US

And there’s no
ofﬁcial support
yet for regions or
continents

Sorry, but this
is not ofﬁcially
supported

So if you need to use the same version across a region,
you should assign each of the countries to the pages
<link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“es-es” href=“http://www.brand.com/es/“ />
<link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“es-mx” href=“http://www.brand.com/latam/“ />
<link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“es-ar” href=“http://www.brand.com/latam/“ />
<link rel=“alternate” hreflang=“es-co” href=“http://www.brand.com/latam/“ />

There’s no limit on
assigning the same
URL to many
targeted countries

You can also use the “x-default” value to specify the
fallback version for unmatched languages/countries
Default and English for the US
<link rel="alternate" hreflang=“x-default“ href=“http://www.brand.com/“ />
brand.com

Don’t do this if
you want the
Mexican home
page to actually
be the one that
ranks in Mexico

With the Mobile First Index if you have independent
mobile URLs you’ll need to annotate them too
<link rel="alternate" hreflang=“en-us" href=“http://m.brand.com/“ />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang=“es-us" href=“http://m.brand.com/es/“ />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang=“en-gb" href=“http://m.brand.co.uk/“ />
English Mobile for the UK
m.brand.com
m.brand.co.uk
m.brand.com/es/
English Mobile for the US
Spanish Mobile for the US

Which should be the same when you’re using  
non-canonical AMP
<link rel="alternate" hreflang=“en-us" href=“http://www.brand.com/amp/“ />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang=“es-us" href=“http://www.brand.com/es/amp/“ />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang=“en-gb" href=“http://www.brand.co.uk/amp/“ />
English AMP for the UK
brand.com/amp/
brand.co.uk/amp/
brand.com/es/amp/
English AMP for the US
Spanish AMP for the US

#HREFLANGSUCCESS BY @ALEYDA FROM #ORAINTI AT @PUBCONHTTPS://WWW.ALEYDASOLIS.COM/ENGLISH/INTERNATIONAL-SEO-TOOLS/HREFLANG-TAGS-GENERATOR/
Minimize errors
by using the
hreﬂang
generator to
obtain the
HTML or XML
sitemap code
pattern for your
different
versions

You can use these values as patterns to use across the
different pages you identiﬁed as relevant to tag

When adding the
hreﬂang in the HTML
head, be careful that
there isn’t any code
that breaks it,
making the hreﬂang
not recognizable
HTTPS://WWW.ILOVESEO.NET/HOW-TO-USE-HREFLANG-CORRECTLY/

#HREFLANGSUCCESS BY @ALEYDA FROM #ORAINTI AT @PUBCONHTTPS://WWW.HREFLANGBUILDER.COM/
If you work in an
enterprise
environment, check
out the hreﬂang
builder to generate
hreﬂang in XML
sitemaps and
facilitate the
mapping process

4VALIDATE THE HREFLANG
IMPLEMENTATION IN TEST ENVIRONMENT

Verify that the relevant pages have been effectively
tagged by crawling the site in a test environment
SITEBULB, DEEPCRAWL, SCREAMING FROG, RYTE, BOTIFY, ONCRAWL

Besides using the right values in the desired pages,
check for pages that might trigger no-return tags issues
SITEBULB, DEEPCRAWL, SCREAMING FROG, RYTE, BOTIFY, ONCRAWL

Like tagging URLs
that are blocked,
no-indexed,
canonicalized to
others, redirected
or with an error
status code

5MONITOR AND TROUBLESHOOT HREFLANG
AFTER LAUNCH

#HREFLANGSUCCESS BY @ALEYDA FROM #ORAINTI AT @PUBCONGOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE
After launching, look for remaining hreﬂang errors in
the Search Console International Targeting Report

Which are the type of issues found? How many URLs
are affected? Of which language/country versions?

Start ﬁxing those
with a higher
number of affected
URLs for your most
important markets

#HREFLANGSUCCESS BY @ALEYDA FROM #ORAINTI AT @PUBCONHTTPS://HREFLANGCHECKER.COM/, HTTPS://TECHNICALSEO.COM/SEO-TOOLS/HREFLANG/
Once you’re
done you can
validate the
speciﬁc URLs
with issues with
free hreﬂang
checkers

Until you have no errors

Check the
remaining trafﬁc
from non-relevant
markets to your
international
versions to
expand the
process

6ESTABLISH HREFLANG BEST PRACTICES &
GUIDELINES

WHICH INTERNATIONAL
VERSIONS WERE
INCLUDED/EXCLUDED
AND WHY?
WHICH PAGES OF THOSE
INTERNATIONAL
VERSIONS WERE
INCLUDED/EXCLUDED
AND WHY?
WHICH
IMPLEMENTATION
METHOD WAS CHOSEN
AND WHY?
WHICH TOOLS WERE
SELECTED TO
GENERATE, TEST AND
MONITOR HREFLANG?
WHEN AND WHERE THE
HREFLANG
IMPLEMENTATION
SHOULD BE TESTED
BEFORE ANY RELEASE?
HOW OFTEN THE
HREFLANG
ANNOTATIONS SHOULD
BE CHECKED AND WHO
WILL DO IT?
HTTP://BIT.LY/HREFLANGPROCESS
Document the process, establishing the steps to follow
to tag any page that is published, changed or removed

It’s time to grow
internationally,
with the right
page versions
ranking!

Thanks

Setting Hreflang for Success #Pubcon

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