In episode 193 of the Search Engine Journal Show, we had the opportunity to interview Bill Hunt, world-renowned speaker and president of Back Azimuth, an international SEO expert. We also talked about what hreflang is and why it is so valuable and complex. All Hreflang What is hreflang? Bill Hunt (BH): Originally started like a meta tag. Pretend to be talking to Google. advertisement Continue reading below "Hey, Google. I'm glad you found this page you're browsing." Next, the tag says, "This page is for the United States (or the market page you visited). To let you know. ,
There are these alternative pages for specific ghost mannequin effect language regions. " You can include the URL of an equivalent page in the UK, Australia, or Spain there. Then they receive it as a signal. If someone searches, for example your company in the UK in English, Google will actually exchange .global or US URLs that are ranked as specified in that market. That's essentially what it is-and by itself it's very valuable but very complicated. How does it work? BH: I need a page designated for a particular market ... that's where things get complicated. So in the first wave you can have / UK. We all think it's England, but it could be Ukrainian. advertisement Continue reading below Or does Google know that the UK doesn't mean user keys or other acronyms? So we needed more than that.
The second part we often see is "Hey, I posted Google Translate in 13 languages on my site, but Google doesn't cover them. Can I use hreflang? " When you look at it, it's one page where Google Translate spins out to X number languages. Therefore, technically there is only one page. A variation of this creative and confusing is if someone says, for example, that they have an English page, then Spanish and French, and can set up Global French or Global English, but set it to say this. You can also have global pages in English the same as in the US, UK and Australia.