Uncommon SEO Knowledge #5 Hreflang (part 2)
Because I had too much to say, here's part 2 with even more hreflang goodness.
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Region codes don't work. Lots of people try to use say "eu" or "la" for all countries in Europe and Latin America. This is not a thing and it won't work.
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Hreflang can be implemented in the sitemap, head, or HTTP header. They're all processed at the time of crawl and put into a bucket of signals.
I don't recommend implementing them in multiple locations because more things can go wrong.
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But for those that did, be careful when troubleshooting this. Many of the SEO tools only look at the <head> implementation and can easily miss conflicting signals in the others.
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And the last thing I want to talk about is how signals work with hreflang. This isn't something confirmed and there has been A LOT of conflicting statements from Googlers around this. I'll cover many of those statements in a minute, but first here's how I think it works.
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Disclaimer, this is what I think and not confirmed.
I believe that canonicalization does cause some signals to be shared, but only for same-language versions. But this part is really murky. It's not known if they actually are consolidated.
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If the pages are duplicate/near-duplicate then they may be combined. The signals aggregated at the canonical version (maybe), the canonical version returned for a query, and then the most relevant page swapped in the SERP.
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A lot of that belief comes from knowing a good bit about canonicalization (ahrefs.com/blog/canonical) and also many statements from Googlers. Here are some of those statements and you can make up your own mind about how it works. I'm happy to discuss this.
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So in one corner we have who has said many times that hreflang does not help with ranking, but just swap to the most relevant. One example: twitter.com/itsdeficio/sta
Then we have saying they share signals. This made it seem like all signals youtu.be/6ewntnqltI4?t=
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Replying to @JohnMu
Thanks for the reply! Is there any chance someone would see a rank increase after implementing hreflang? Is there any "trust" transferred with the tags, or is its sole purpose telling crawlers the language and regon of the page?
Replying to
I straight up asked about the difference in messaging in 's AMA on /r/TechSEO reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comm
In this he made it seem like signals could be inherited from the page that was strongest on it's own, but not consolidated in the cluster. Mostly like John's answer.
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Here's Gary again talking about combining signals with a great example of how it works.
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But then in another thread on Reddit pointed me to alternate names and said that hreflang doesn't change that part of canonicalization. So now I'm back to thinking that duplicates can consolidate (maybe).
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And finally to wrap this up, here's a writeup from
who may be the only SEO to ever get a bug bounty from Google. They should have paid him more. 💰 It is related to hreflang implementation in the sitemap and another system that is now gone.
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Actually, one more addition. We really need a way to see how Google is treating these. I feel like it's a bad move from Google to do away with this report. This suggestion from would work.
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Hi @JohnMu 
- now that the international targeting report will be gone, would it be possible if we could still have hreflang information shown via the URL Inspect report to see which are the alternates that G sees of each page, and if issues are identified with them?... 
- now that the international targeting report will be gone, would it be possible if we could still have hreflang information shown via the URL Inspect report to see which are the alternates that G sees of each page, and if issues are identified with them?... Show this thread
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And if you missed part 1, it's here.
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Uncommon SEO Knowledge #5 Hreflang (part 1)
Apparently there's a 25 tweet limit in threads and I have too much to say.
Google is getting rid of the reporting for this in Google Search Console and it has some interesting implications for SEOs who work internationally.
twitter.com/googlesearchc/…
twitter.com/googlesearchc/…Show this thread
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