John Mueller of Google posted an excellent detailed response to an hreflang implementation query on Reddit. The response is so detailed, I’m afraid that if I attempt to dumb it down, I’ll get it improper.

And truthfully, hreflang shouldn’t be my factor, that’s one thing that I haven’t got a lot of any expertise with on the technical web optimization entrance. However the response seems tremendous fascinating that I needed to focus on it for many who do a whole lot of hreflang and multilingual web optimization work.

The query was “Hreflang for language subdirectories already nested inside a area subdirectory: horrible thought?” Click on to the Reddit thread to see the complete query.

Right here is John’s response, the factors I discover fascinating is that he stated (1) solely do that for the house web page as a result of it may be tremendous advanced, (2) redirect the / residence web page for US customers to /us for US customers. Right here is the complete response:

My suggestion can be to not shift /de & /fr into /eu/de or /eu/fr. There is no web optimization benefit you’d get from that, and site-moves like this are a whole lot of work. If something, I would take into account shifting “/*” (en-us) right into a “/us” folder. That manner you may have clearer separation of the components (“/us/*” is all US, “/fr/*” is all French, and so forth). It will make monitoring a bit simpler, and make it simpler for serps to grasp the sections (vs shifting /fr into /eu/fr, which might make it even tougher to grasp sections).

Additionally, hreflang is on a per-page foundation, so you’ll do it on all pages. You talked about it as being sections, and maybe you are already doing it correctly, so that is only for completeness. Should you’re not doing it on all pages, I would take into account checking your stats for pages that get confused probably the most (improper nation guests), and at the very least add it there. Likelihood is that is largely your homepage, so in case you’re solely doing it there, you are most likely getting a whole lot of the worth of hreflang already.

And … in case you do any of this and routinely redirect “/” (simply the basis homepage) to the suitable model, you will need to guarantee that it is specified because the x-default for the set of homepages. With out doing that, to Google it might probably appear like “/” is a separate web page from the others.

(edit to elaborate solely on that final half… — that is particularly when you have /us for US, and do geo-IP redirects, which I usually do not advocate)

If for US customers, “/” (simply that web page) redirects to “/us”, AND you may have hreflang throughout /us, /fr with x-default assigned to /us, what can occur is that Google sees “/” as being an English web page, additionally acknowledges /us, /fr as separate pages, after which reveals each “/” and “/(one of many others” within the search outcomes. You may keep away from this by setting “/” because the x-default (even when it redirects). Then Google will see “/” because the default “/us” for US, “/fr” for France.

This additionally means that you may’t have “/eu” as x-default (there can solely be one #highlander #xdefault), however you may nonetheless use that by specifying it as hreflang for a bunch of your frequent international locations (you may specify a number of international locations per URL). So in the long run you’d have “/” = x-default, “/us” for US, “/fr” for France, “/eu” for a bunch of nations, and redirect from “/” to one of the best model.

All of that is just for the homepage, I would not do it for any of the opposite pages of the location as a result of it is so advanced & exhausting to handle, and since the homepage might be the web page that will get probably the most search impressions.

What do you discover fascinating about this response?

Discussion board dialogue at Reddit.