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John Mueller Offers Hreflang Google SEO Advice

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google global hreflang geo

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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Google Hanukkah Decorations Are Live For 2023

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Google Hanukkah 2023

Hanukkah (aka Chanukah) starts this coming Thursday night, December 7th. Google has added its Hanukkah decorations to the Google Search results interface to celebrate. Google does this every year and I expect to see the same rollout in the coming weeks for Christmas and Kawanzaa but for now, since Chanukah is in the coming days, we have the Hanukkah decorations live at Google Search.

Here is a screenshot of the Chanukah decorations as they look like on the mobile search results.

Google Hanukkah Decorations 2023

You can see it yourself by searching on Google for [chanukah], [hanukkah], but not yet [חֲנוּכָּה‎] or other spelling variations yet but it should soon. It looks better on mobile than it does on desktop results.

To see the past, the 2023 decorations, 2021 decorations, 2020 Chanukah decorations, 2019 Google holiday decorations, the 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010 and so on.

Happy Chanukah, everyone!

Forum discussion at X.

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Google Pay Accepted Icons In Google Search Results

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Woman Checking Out Store Google Logo

Google seems to be testing a Google Pay Accepted label or icon in the Google search results. This label has the super G logo followed by the words “Pay accepted” words next to search result snippets that support Google Pay and notate such in their structured data.

This was first spotted by Khushal Bherwani who shared some screenshots of this on X – here is one:

G Pay Accepted Google Search

Here are some more screenshots:

Brodie Clark also posted some screenshots after on X:

Google Pay Accepted Google Search

I tried to replicate this but I came up short.

This is not the first time Google had similar icons like this in its search results.

Forum discussion at X.



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Google Discover Showing Older Content Since Follow Feature Arrived

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Dog Astronut Google Logo

Typically, Google Discover shows content that is less than a day old, but it can show content that is weeks, months, or even years old. However, typically, Google will show more recent content in the Discover feed. Well, that may have changed with the new Google follow feature.

Glenn Gabe, who is a very active Google Discover user, noticed that since the Follow feature rolled out, he has been seeing content that is weeks and months old way more often than before the follow feature rolled out. Glenn wrote on X that “this could also be playing a role. i.e. Google isn’t providing as much recent content, but instead, focusing on providing targeted content based on the topics you are following.”

It makes sense that if you follow a specific topic and if Google Discover only shows the most authoritative types of content, it might be hard for Google to find new content on that topic. So it does make sense that Google may show older content more often for that specific topic you follow.

Here are screenshots Glenn shared:

Google Discover Old Stories Follow

Google Discover Old Stories Follow2

Have you noticed this in your Discover feed?

Forum discussion at X.



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