SEO

Getting Started With Multilingual Website Tags

Published

2 years ago

May 4, 2022

Often, the best practices of SEO don’t give us a direct ranking signal boost from Google, although they help drive significant traffic to our website.

Herflang tags are a perfect example of this.

While Gary Illyes has stated that hreflang tags don’t serve as a ranking signal in the algorithmic sense, in a cluster, a group of similar content pages in different languages share the same ranking authority.

In our pursuit of optimizing user intent and experience, writing content for different geographic locations and languages provides tremendous value to our website.

That’s where the magic of the hreflang tag comes in.

Rather than having the same webpage competing for users in Australia and France, you could have alternate pages that pop up at the top of SERPs optimized for that country’s language, currency, and privacy laws.

However, hreflang tags are one of the most complicated parts of technical SEO.

Unfortunately, you could do a lot more harm than good by improperly implementing this tag attribute across your website.

That’s why I want to provide this refresher course on everything you need to know about hreflang tags and the best practices to get started with international SEO using these incredibly granular tags.

What Is An Hreflang Tag?

Hreflang tags are a link tag attribute in HTML that enables websites to serve content specifically for users in different countries and languages.

If you view the page source of any given web document, the first tag you’ll often see is this:

The language attribute specifies this webpage employs English text for an English-speaking audience over search.

However, if a website wanted to target French-speaking users in France, they could use an hreflang attribute in the head of their HTML, which would look something like this:

Let’s break this down for easier understanding.

Basically, an hreflang string consists of three critical components:

rel=alternate attribute: This tag specifies this webpage is an alternate version of the original web page, not the canonical.
href= attribute: This tells Google the original URL of the alternate web page.
hreflang= attribute: This tag specifies the language and country this web page is targeting.

In the above example, the alternate tag specified that URL https://fr.example.com was the primary English web page’s alternate.

In addition, the end of the tag also specified that the webpage was for French speakers in France.

In addition, webmasters could also create an alternate page for English speakers in France by adjusting the hreflang attribute to hreflang=”en-fr” which means this page is for English speakers in France.

Thorough hreflang implementation allows you to become more granular with geotargeting and serve up local content to people all across the globe.

What’s not to love from an SEO or content marketing perspective?

Why You Need Hreflang Tags

We can do more with hreflang tags than optimize for different languages.

In fact, hreflang tags enable us to do three critical things with our website:

Optimize webpages for the same language in the same country (Ex. “fr-fr”).
Optimize webpages for different languages in that same country (Ex. “de-fr”).
Optimize webpages for different languages in different countries (Ex. “de-us”).

But why not just create broad English web pages for people in the UK and across the world?

Well, creating alternate web pages for English users in the UK and elsewhere enables customers overseas to purchase products on your website in pounds and localizes content specifically for their interests.

Furthermore, creating clusters of content also accumulates more SEO value for our website and web pages as a whole.

Another benefit of hreflang tags is that website owners can create specific web pages that conform to international laws and tax codes to avoid legal trouble.

Ultimately, proper hreflang tags benefit your website in many key ways, including:

Localizing content for users across the globe.
Gaining access to global markets.
Allowing users to pay in native currencies.
Preventing alternate web pages from competing with each other.
Keeping websites organized.

At this point, I bet that hreflang tags sound like all peaches and cream for your web strategy.

Now, here comes the hard part: Setting up your tags.

I’ll walk you through several different strategies, so you have a solid understanding of how tags work in practice and how to implement them on your website.

First, let’s discuss some of the challenges you’ll encounter along the way if you are new to using hreflang tags.

Common Challenges Setting Up Hreflang Tags

Avoiding Duplicate Content

Improper hreflang tag implementation will result in duplicate content errors.

While Google doesn’t directly punish duplicate content, you don’t want an English page designed for Americans outranking a page meant for English speakers in France.

Segmenting Content Between Different Language And Country Codes

Hreflang tags require time, money, and commitment to properly organize each web page for a specific language and country.

You’ll also need to look up every country and language’s specific HTML codes.

Keeping Hreflang Tags Organized As You Add New Content

This challenge only compounds as you continue to add more content to your site.

Again, think of large-scale ecommerce sites and what they go through daily trying to add new products for customers across the globe.

Hreflang Tags Are Not A Directive

Unfortunately, hreflang tags are not an absolute directive. Mostly, hreflang tags serve as a hint for Google or Yandex to prioritize certain content, but nothing is guaranteed.

Hreflang Tags Work Differently Between Google And Bing

Search engines like Bing barely even look at these tags.

Instead, Bing uses meta tags like the <html lang=”en”> tag, which I showed in the beginning to organize and display content.

Hreflang Principles

We need to understand the relationship between different web pages and HTML to get started.

When implementing hreflang attributes, we want to remember two principles:

Hreflang Tags Need To Be Self-referential

In the past, Google has recommended that every webpage have a self-referential hreflang tag that points back to the original.

For example say your original URL is https://example.com/us. Then your hreflang attributes will be ordered like so:

So for every alternate webpage you create, you must never forget to include a link attribute for that webpage.

For example, a French webpage should have an href attribute for the French URL.

It may feel a tad redundant, but it cuts down on confusion from Google’s end and helps avoid duplicate content errors.

Hreflang Tags Need To Be Bi-directional

This second principle is absolutely required and will eliminate any lost SEO value from clustering your web pages and transferring those awesome metrics between the two.

So let’s take the above example and say that the homepage has an alternate version translated into French for French visitors from France.

We need to implement a tag on the French page that points back to the main U.S. page and self-references itself.

It’s not as confusing as it sounds! Simply just swap them around like this:

If you have dozens of different languages and countries, don’t sweat.

All you need to do is have the original URL listed as self-referencing at the bottom and ensure that every page has tags set up for every language and region, not just your original English page.

Bonus

I also recommend using an X-default page for situations when Google can’t extract their language or region from a user’s browser or IP address.

An x-default page asks visitors what language they prefer and sends them to the appropriate alternate page. The tag will look something like this:

Now that we know how the HTML code works and how to set them up, we just need to learn how to set hreflang tags up.

Setting Up Hreflang Tags

You generally have three great options available to set up hreflang tags and implement them at scale.

HTML/HTTP Headers

Setting up HTML tags is the simplest but most time-consuming method. I recommend this for websites without a sitemap, although you should definitely invest in a sitemap, especially if you have a ton of content or products!

Going through what we’ve discussed so far, set a <link> tag to the alternate version of your page in the header of the HTML to look something like this:

From there, make sure each tag is self-referential and bi-directional.

In addition, if you want to create alternate pages for .pdf files without HTML, you’ll need to implement the same tags in the HTTP header of each page.

Fortunately, the link will look the same and you can apply the same rules for easy implementation.

Of course, you can see how hard this can be to scale, especially if you serve customers in dozens of countries in dozens of languages.

Generally, changing the HTML or HTTP is fine when you need to adjust a few pages over time, but this method won’t serve you well in the long run if you’re dealing with thousands of URLs.

XML Sitemap

I recommend using your XML sitemap to implement all of your tags in a single file and optimize your website at scale.

This method is pretty straightforward.

All you need to do is add <xhtml:link to the front of your URL and add all alternative versions of the page underneath.

<url>

<loc>https://example.com/link</loc>

<xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-us” href=”x-default”

<xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en” href=”https://example.com/link/” />

<xhtml:link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr” href=”https://example.com/lien/” />

Using this method, you can add all of your relevant tags in one file instead of manually adding link attributes to the HTML of every webpage.

Once completed, submit an updated sitemap to Google Search Console.

Of course, there are several ways to automate this process by using a spreadsheet to copy and paste all of your URLs from a sitemap under separate languages and regions.

There are also several hreflang generation tools available online, although I’d recommend doing your research before you end up causing more harm than good to your website.

Common Mistakes Setting Up Hreflang Tags

Based on how meticulous hreflang tags can be, you’ll likely run into several issues during setup. As a result, many of these mistakes will spell duplicate content in the eyes of Google and sour your rankings. Don’t worry because the solutions are pretty straightforward.

Not Making Hreflang Tags Self-Referential

A missing hreflang self-referencing attribute can be holding back one of your pages from ranking.

Fortunately, multiple site audit tools, including Screaming Frog, SEMrush, and Ahrefs, check for proper hreflang implementation, including self-referencing attributes.

Scan for pages missing this attribute and fix issues in real-time.

No Return Tag

Additionally, it’s easy to violate our second principle of hreflang tags by failing to employ bi-directional tags.

You can spot this error in the International Targeting and Language tab in Google Search Console.

Simply go into your sitemap or adjust the header tag of your webpage to link back to the original or canonical webpage.

Incomplete Or Improper Tags

This issue could arise for several reasons, including human error or your hreflang generator tool.

Some of the most common issues related to improper tags include using the wrong language or country codes or simply inputting improper values in your HTML code.

Fortunately, your crawler will spot any incomplete hreflang tags and alert you so you can have it fixed in no time.

Blocked Or No Index Pages

One of any website’s most common and overlooked issues is no-indexing errors.

For example, Javascript, iFrames, and several additional services are notorious for blocking or no-indexing valuable web pages without our knowledge.

To begin addressing this issue, check your robots.txt file to see if you have any pages blocked that should not be in your file.

Next, check your Javascript and CMS to ensure you don’t have the no-index tag checked off.

I’d also run a crawl and look through your spreadsheet to see what URLs are no-indexed.

Finally, go into your HTML and insert your hreflang tag in the header, above the noindex tag, to prevent Javascript or iFrames from blocking these pages.

Linking To Redirected Pages

As your site grows and matures, you’ll often employ redirects to new content to give your website fresh SEO value.

However, hreflang tags must reference a canonical webpage.

Therefore, if your tag references a redirected web page or comes back with an HTTP response code, Google will simply ignore the entire hreflang tag and decide what content it wants to display.

To fix this, you’ll need to adjust the URL in the hreflang tag to reflect the new canonical webpage.

Double-Check Your Tags

Finally, I feel it’s best to reinforce the need for periodic site audits to ensure you’ve correctly implemented your hreflang tags and that aging international content is still ranking.

A crawler is a good source to determine whether or not your new hreflang tags have any issues or that any aging content on your website needs adjusting.

For example, Screaming Frog allows you to crawl an XML sitemap and then check for the following issues with your hreflang tags in its dropdown menu:

Non-200 hreflang URLs.
Missing X-Default.
Missing Self Reference.
Inconsistent Region and Language Confirmation Links.

You will also be warned of any improper hreflang implementation in Search Console through its International Targeting tab based on declining traffic analytics.

Many enterprise companies often ask me whether or not hreflang tags are truly worth the hassle.

As Google’s search algorithm becomes more developed, it has become better at spotting and serving the correct web pages for different languages and regions.

Additionally, the investment to manage hreflang tags across thousands of webpage is expensive and tedious.

However, if we want to get the most SEO value out of clustering and localizing content by region/language, then implementing hreflang tags is necessary.

Furthermore, multilingual ecommerce sites can gain a massive return out of proper hreflang implementation.

The central issue truly comes down to practice, as human and machine errors can cause more headaches than they solve.

With the right knowledge, tools, and help, managing hreflang tags can be easy.

Hopefully, in this guide, you’ve acquired the knowledge required to get started with implementing and maintaining hreflang tags across your multi-language website.

More resources:

Featured Image: liravega/Shutterstock

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State Of Marketing Data Standards In The AI Era [Webinar]

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Want to learn how you can mitigate privacy risks and boost ROI through data standards?

Watch this on-demand webinar and learn how companies are addressing new privacy laws, taking advantage of AI, and organizing their data to better capture the campaign data they need, as well as how you can implement these findings in your campaigns.

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Walk away with tactics and best practices that you can use to improve your marketing data now.

Chris Comstock, Chief Growth Officer at Claravine, will show you the marketing data trends of top advertisers and the potential pitfalls that come with poor data standards.

Learn the key ways to level up your data strategy to pinpoint campaign success.

View the slides below or check out the full webinar for all the details.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

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SEO

96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here’s How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

Published

1 day ago

December 1, 2023

Entireweb News Bot

96.55% of Content Gets No Traffic From Google. Here's How to Be in the Other 3.45% [New Research for 2023]

It’s no secret that the web is growing by millions, if not billions of pages per day.

Our Content Explorer tool discovers 10 million new pages every 24 hours while being very picky about the pages that qualify for inclusion. The “main” Ahrefs web crawler crawls that number of pages every two minutes.

But how much of this content gets organic traffic from Google?

To find out, we took the entire database from our Content Explorer tool (around 14 billion pages) and studied how many pages get traffic from organic search and why.

How many web pages get organic search traffic?

96.55% of all pages in our index get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.

Distribution of pages by traffic from Content Explorer

Before we move on to discussing why the vast majority of pages never get any search traffic from Google (and how to avoid being one of them), it’s important to address two discrepancies with the studied data:

~14 billion pages may seem like a huge number, but it’s not the most accurate representation of the entire web. Even compared to the size of Site Explorer’s index of 340.8 billion pages, our sample size for this study is quite small and somewhat biased towards the “quality side of the web.”
Our search traffic numbers are estimates. Even though our database of ~651 million keywords in Site Explorer (where our estimates come from) is arguably the largest database of its kind, it doesn’t contain every possible thing people search for in Google. There’s a chance that some of these pages get search traffic from super long-tail keywords that are not popular enough to make it into our database.

That said, these two “inaccuracies” don’t change much in the grand scheme of things: the vast majority of published pages never rank in Google and never get any search traffic.

But why is this, and how can you be a part of the minority that gets organic search traffic from Google?

Well, there are hundreds of SEO issues that may prevent your pages from ranking well in Google. But if we focus only on the most common scenarios, assuming the page is indexed, there are only three of them.

Reason 1: The topic has no search demand

If nobody is searching for your topic, you won’t get any search traffic—even if you rank #1.

For example, I recently Googled “pull sitemap into google sheets” and clicked the top-ranking page (which solved my problem in seconds, by the way). But if you plug that URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer, you’ll see that it gets zero estimated organic search traffic:

The top-ranking page for this topic gets no traffic because there's no search demand

This is because hardly anyone else is searching for this, as data from Keywords Explorer confirms:

Keyword data from Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer confirms that this topic has no search demand

This is why it’s so important to do keyword research. You can’t just assume that people are searching for whatever you want to talk about. You need to check the data.

Our Traffic Potential (TP) metric in Keywords Explorer can help with this. It estimates how much organic search traffic the current top-ranking page for a keyword gets from all the queries it ranks for. This is a good indicator of the total search demand for a topic.

You’ll see this metric for every keyword in Keywords Explorer, and you can even filter for keywords that meet your minimum criteria (e.g., 500+ monthly traffic potential):

Filtering for keywords with Traffic Potential (TP) in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

Reason 2: The page has no backlinks

Backlinks are one of Google’s top three ranking factors, so it probably comes as no surprise that there’s a clear correlation between the number of websites linking to a page and its traffic.

Pages with more referring domains get more traffic

Same goes for the correlation between a page’s traffic and keyword rankings:

Pages with more referring domains rank for more keywords

Does any of this data prove that backlinks help you rank higher in Google?

No, because correlation does not imply causation. However, most SEO professionals will tell you that it’s almost impossible to rank on the first page for competitive keywords without backlinks—an observation that aligns with the data above.

The key word there is “competitive.” Plenty of pages get organic traffic while having no backlinks…

… but from what I can tell, almost all of them are about low-competition topics.

For example, this lyrics page for a Neil Young song gets an estimated 162 monthly visits with no backlinks:

Example of a page with traffic but no backlinks, via Ahrefs' Content Explorer

But if we check the keywords it ranks for, they almost all have Keyword Difficulty (KD) scores in the single figures:

Some of the low-difficulty keywords a page without traffic ranks for

It’s the same story for this page selling upholstered headboards:

You might have noticed two other things about these pages:

Neither of them get that much traffic. This is pretty typical. Our index contains ~20 million pages with no referring domains, yet only 2,997 of them get more than 1K search visits per month. That’s roughly 1 in every 6,671 pages with no backlinks.
Both of the sites they’re on have high Domain Rating (DR) scores. This metric shows the relative strength of a website’s backlink profile. Stronger sites like these have more PageRank that they can pass to pages with internal links to help them rank.

Bottom line? If you want your pages to get search traffic, you really only have two options:

Target uncompetitive topics that you can rank for with few or no backlinks.
Target competitive topics and build backlinks to rank.

If you want to find uncompetitive topics, try this:

Enter a topic into Keywords Explorer
Go to the Matching terms report
Set the Keyword Difficulty (KD) filter to max. 20
Set the Lowest DR filter to your site’s DR (this will show you keywords with at least one of the same or lower DR ranking in the top 5)

Filtering for low-competition keywords in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer

(Remember to keep an eye on the TP column to make sure they have traffic potential.)

To rank for more competitive topics, you’ll need to earn or build high-quality backlinks to your page. If you’re not sure how to do that, start with the guides below. Keep in mind that it’ll be practically impossible to get links unless your content adds something to the conversation.

Reason 3. The page doesn’t match search intent

Google wants to give users the most relevant results for a query. That’s why the top organic results for “best yoga mat” are blog posts with recommendations, not product pages.

It's obviously what searchers want when they search for "best yoga mats"

Basically, Google knows that searchers are in research mode, not buying mode.

It’s also why this page selling yoga mats doesn’t show up, despite it having backlinks from more than six times more websites than any of the top-ranking pages:

Page selling yoga mats that has lots of backlinks

Number of linking websites to the top-ranking pages for "best yoga mats"

Luckily, the page ranks for thousands of other more relevant keywords and gets tens of thousands of monthly organic visits. So it’s not such a big deal that it doesn’t rank for “best yoga mats.”

Number of keyword rankings for the page selling yoga mats

However, if you have pages with lots of backlinks but no organic traffic—and they already target a keyword with traffic potential—another quick SEO win is to re-optimize them for search intent.

We did this in 2018 with our free backlink checker.

It was originally nothing but a boring landing page explaining the benefits of our product and offering a 7-day trial:

Original landing page for our free backlink checker

After analyzing search intent, we soon realized the issue:

People weren’t looking for a landing page, but rather a free tool they could use right away.

So, in September 2018, we created a free tool and published it under the same URL. It ranked #1 pretty much overnight, and has remained there ever since.