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Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
X-default is generally misunderstood as well. The way this works is by most specific match. Think of it as a check for a higher match in this order:
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Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
1. lc-cc = language in the specified country 2. lc = doesn't match a country but matches the language settings of the user searching 3. x-default = overall default if it doesn't match any language+country or language or if it can't be determined. This is like a catch all.
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Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
Replying to
@patrickstox
-Duplicate content. As I mentioned earlier, they try and swap these. The problem I think they have is that some of their other systems around canonicalization and duplicates may combine pages before they're actually crawled and processed for hreflang.
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Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
This usually resolves over time. Once the pages are processed properly, but that can take weeks or months and in the meantime the wrong page is showing in SERPs. I've said before that I wish they'd just crawl the whole set at once.
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Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
Because of this, the setup I always fight for is one version for each language, then for country based content to use dynamic personalization. Fewer, stronger pages and less chance for things to go wrong.
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Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
A pro tip to check what's showing in different regions, edit the URL to include &hl=lc&gl=cc where lc is the language code and cc is the country code.
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Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
In my last tweet for part 1, I want to give a shout out to
@ahrefs
Site Audit for troubleshooting hreflang. It's best in class imo. I worked on much of the functionality here to make sure it found issues others miss. Part 2:
Quote Tweet
Patrick Stox
@patrickstox
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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