Google’s Pierre Far On Introducing “x-default hreflang” for International Landing Pages

Google’s Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, announced on the Google Webmaster Central blog a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for webmasters to specify international landing pages. It’s called “x-default hreflang,” and it signals to Google’s algorithms that a page doesn’t target a specific language or location.

The Google Webmaster team also has discussed a good example to further describe the activity. Apparently, Website xyz.com has website content focusing on users all over the world as follows:

Google Introduces ‘x-default hreflang’ Annotation For Webmasters

http://xyz.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
http://xyz.com//en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
http://xyz.com//en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
http://xyz.com//: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide

In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using rel-alternate-hreflang using Sitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:

<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://xyz.com/en-gb&#8221; hreflang=”en-gb” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://xyz.com/en-us&#8221; hreflang=”en-us” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://xyz.com/en-au&#8221; hreflang=”en-au” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://xyz.com/&#8221; hreflang=”x-default” />

The annotation can also be used for homepages that dynamically modify their contents depending on users’ geolocation or the Accept-Language headers. I covered this on Google Webmaster Central Blog from Today and then posted it Google+. Checked with reference to the documents mentioned below…

• Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum – http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/internationalization

Related Stories:

• Google Adds “hreflang” Link Element For Multilingual Content
• An International SEO Implementation Tale – Sitemaps: rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”
• International and Multilingual sites: The Criteria to Establish an SEO Friendly Structure
• Newest International SEO Challenge: Hreflang & Canonical Tags
• How To Implement The hreflang Element Using XML Sitemaps

Alok Raghuwanshi is an India-based SEO Professional, and author of an SEO and social media marketing blog. Take a look and let me know what you think by including your comment below. Thank you and have a great day.

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