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Hreflang & X-Default on Auto-Redirecting Homepages

mike80

10:42 am on Jan 30, 2014 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member

Hello,

I'm running a network of international, multilingual sub-domains:

- www.example.com - Targeting users from all around the world
- uk.example.com - Targeting English speaking users from the United Kingdom
- de.example.com - Targeting German speaking users
- it.example.com - Targeting Italian speaking users

To improve user experience, the homepages (and homepages only) are now redirecting the users according to their Geo-location (based on IP).

All other pages of all 4 sites are not redirecting the users.

Now i'm wondering what should I do in term of Google hreflang/x-default localization tags:

[support.google.com...]

My questions are:

1. In this specific case, do I need to define an x-default?
2. If so, should www.example.com be defined as x-default?
3. If the internal pages aren't redirecting, but they're broadly similar in content, should they still contain hreflang and x-default?
4. Can www.example.com be defined in the homepage as x-default, but as hreflang="en" in the internal pages?

aakk9999

2:57 am on Jan 31, 2014 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member

10+ Year Member

Top Contributors Of The Month

First an observation: Considering the list of your sample domains, the only home page redirect may make sense is www.example.com and uk.example.com redirect as they both serve the same language (English).

I think it is very annoying for visitors to click on the German SERPs result just to be taken to English home page just because they happen to be in UK (or vice versa). Also, the search query result may not exist in the content of the page served in the other language.

A question for you: What are you doing to Googlebot (US IP) when it lands on German page? Are you also redirecting it?

With regards to your questions:

1 & 2. Google says:

Introducing "x-default hreflang" for international landing pages
April 10, 2013
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com]

The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited.

According to this, you can set up x-default on www.example.com, although in your case I do not think it is necessary. You may want to study WMT Search Queries and check your impressions and clicks broken down to various countries you do not have a translation for and then decide whether the right page was shown in SERPs and whether it would be better that www.example.com was shown instead.

3. hreflang that specifies a particular language (or a combination of language/region) is very useful in aiding Google to get your language right! So yes and it is advisable as sometimes Google can get language wrong which affects not only your CTR but also your SERPs positioning and hreflang helps in this not happening.

By the way, if page content is similar, but it is in a different language, then this is not the same content in Google's eyes, and for your English sites example.com and uk.example.com, the hreflang should will take care of similarity.

4. Yes you can, as the attribute belongs to a page, not to the domain.