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John Mueller Offers Hreflang Google SEO Advice

Published

3 months ago

March 16, 2023

John Mueller of Google posted a super detailed response to an hreflang implementation question on Reddit. The response is so detailed, I am afraid that if I try to dumb it down, I will get it wrong.

And honestly, hreflang is not my thing, that is something that I don’t have much of any experience with on the technical SEO front. But the response looks super interesting that I wanted to highlight it for those who do a lot of hreflang and multilingual SEO work.

The question was “Hreflang for language subdirectories already nested within a region subdirectory: terrible idea?” Click to the Reddit thread to see the full question.

Here is John’s response, the points I find interesting is that he said (1) only do this for the home page because it can be super complex, (2) redirect the / home page for US users to /us for US users. Here is the full response:

My recommendation would be not to shift /de & /fr into /eu/de or /eu/fr. There’s no SEO advantage you’d get from that, and site-moves like this are a lot of work. If anything, I might consider moving “/*” (en-us) into a “/us” folder. That way you have clearer separation of the parts (“/us/*” is all US, “/fr/*” is all French, etc). It would make tracking a bit easier, and make it easier for search engines to understand the sections (vs moving /fr into /eu/fr, which would make it even harder to understand sections).

Also, hreflang is on a per-page basis, so you would do it on all pages. You mentioned it as being sections, and perhaps you’re already doing it properly, so this is just for completeness. If you’re not doing it on all pages, I’d consider checking your stats for pages that get confused the most (wrong country visitors), and at least add it there. Chances are this is mostly your homepage, so if you’re only doing it there, you’re probably getting a lot of the value of hreflang already.

And … if you do any of this and automatically redirect “/” (just the root homepage) to the appropriate version, you must make sure that it’s specified as the x-default for the set of homepages. Without doing that, to Google it can look like “/” is a separate page from the others.

(edit to elaborate only on that last part… — this is specifically if you have /us for US, and do geo-IP redirects, which I generally don’t recommend)

If for US users, “/” (just that page) redirects to “/us”, AND you have hreflang across /us, /fr with x-default assigned to /us, what can happen is that Google sees “/” as being an English page, also recognizes /us, /fr as separate pages, and then shows both “/” and “/(one of the others” in the search results. You can avoid this by setting “/” as the x-default (even if it redirects). Then Google will see “/” as the default “/us” for US, “/fr” for France.

This also means that you can’t have “/eu” as x-default (there can only be one #highlander #xdefault), but you can still use that by specifying it as hreflang for a bunch of your common countries (you can specify multiple countries per URL). So in the end you’d have “/” = x-default, “/us” for US, “/fr” for France, “/eu” for a bunch of countries, and redirect from “/” to the best version.

All of this is only for the homepage, I wouldn’t do it for any of the other pages of the site because it’s so complex & hard to manage, and because the homepage is probably the page that gets the most search impressions.

What do you find interesting about this response?

Forum discussion at Reddit.

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Related Topics:advice Google Hreflang John Mueller Offers searchengine seo

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Bing Chat Now With Anchor Text Hyperlinks In Answers

Published

1 hour ago

May 31, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Instead of just showing citations in the footer of the response and answers in Bing Chat, Bing is now showing anchor text hyperlinks as responses. In fact, if you watch the answer being built, Bing Chat will create the actual HTML hyperlink.

Here is what the anchor text-based hyperlink looks like in the output of Bing Chat answers:

Shameem Adhikarath spotted this the other day and posted it on Twitter, here is his example:

Noticed that @bing chat results now include direct clickable links alongside reference.

cc:@rustybrick pic.twitter.com/yJr9QUVH8A

— Shameem Adhikarath (@shemiadhikarath) May 29, 2023

I am a fan of this look and implementation – good work Bing!

Update: Brodie Clark said this is not new.

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Early Complaints & Responses On The Google Search Generative Experience

Published

7 hours ago

May 30, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

Google began to slowly roll out the Google Search Generative Experience on Thursday and I posted many screenshots of what I found. Since then, Danny Sullivan, Google’s Search Liaison, responded to some public complaints and criticism of this new search experience. John Mueller of Google also responded to some questions and complaints.

I figured it would be useful to compile those complaints and responses in this story.

Attribution complaints:

I see you noted how in expanded view, the association is even clearer. SGE is an experiment, so this type of feedback is appreciated and helpful as we continue to improve it. Also shared a bit more on linking here https://t.co/x4LLTp0nVH — again, thank you for the feedback.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 27, 2023

Generative responses are corroborated by sources from the web & when a portion of a snapshot briefly includes content from a specific source, we will prominently highlight that source in the snapshot. In this example, the first link matches that & it also shows in expanded view. pic.twitter.com/xPRit5FssA

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 26, 2023

It’s the first link to the right of the snapshot. I’ve put a box around it. Also notice the other box at the end. When you see this, you can click through all the corroborating sources without going to expanded mode. pic.twitter.com/AoGoe9uMGJ

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 26, 2023

It’s the first link even when you don’t expand. That said, appreciate the feedback. SGE is an experimental experience in Search Labs, and it will evolve over time as we learn what is most helpful.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 26, 2023

Appreciate the feedback, and would encourage you or anyone with access to also make use of the feedback tool that’s part of SGE. It’s an experiment, so the feedback will help us shape it and improve.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 26, 2023

Appreciate the feedback; will pass it on.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 26, 2023

Privacy complaint:

We use queries and other feedback to improve the predictive quality of SGE. But similar to autocomplete, we take steps to prevent any personally-identifiable information that may be contained in a query from being used for model training purposes.

— Google SearchLiaison (@searchliaison) May 26, 2023

Timing and location of the roll out:

Country-based roll-outs can be frustrating, sorry! It’s (hopefully) not going to go away, time to be patient :-).

— John Mueller (official) · #StaplerLife (@JohnMu) May 26, 2023

Search Console request:

It’s still early days 🙂

— John Mueller (official) · #StaplerLife (@JohnMu) May 26, 2023

Forum discussion at Twitter.

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Menachem Ani On Google Ads & Structuring Performance Max Campaigns

Published

13 hours ago

May 30, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

I went to Menachem Ani’s office, JXT Group, to chat all things paid search. We first spoke about he first got into the Google Ads business, he was doing Google Ads since the early times. He started in the space doing ads for eBay listings, using Froogle and Google AdWords in 2003. We then went off on some of the older days and the community.

In 2009 he started his own agency by doing some freelancing during a recession. It was a challenge, and scary, but it all worked out. And he focuses specifically on Google Ads with a slight focus on e-commerce, performance max, and lead generation. He does also Microsoft Advertising but it is a limited spend in general.

We spoke about how Google Ads has changed over the years and how complex it has grown.

But then we dove directly into how to structure PMax campaigns in Google Ads. Menachem said they like to condense the campaigns as much as possible. They look at the service breakdowns and also look at the goals. That defines how they segment into multiple campaigns. But then within campaigns, they break out asset groups within the product lines. But there is no specific number of campaigns, it depends on the client and what they sell. But the fewer campaigns, the better, he said.

More to come, but to learn more about Menachem Ani follow him @MenachemAni and on LinkedIn.

You can subscribe to our YouTube channel by clicking here so you don’t miss the next vlog where I interviews. I do have a nice lineup of interviews scheduled with SEOs and SEMS, many of which you don’t want to miss – and I promise to continue to make these vlogs better over time. If you want to be interviewed, please fill out this form with your details.

Forum discussion at YouTube.

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