On this episode of AmsiveDigital TV, Avinash Conda and Director of SEO Sarah Dryden, discuss International SEO.
International SEO can become tricky when you are serving up your site in different languages and countries around the world. How do you tell Google which sites/search results should be served up in each different country?
Sarah explains that one thing they suggest to their clients who have websites in different countries and languages, who want to reach an even larger global audience, is to mark up their XML sitemap with “hreflang” attribute.
“Hreflang” is a “rel” tag, which indicates to Google for English speakers in other countries to serve the English site or for example, Spanish speakers in in another country to serve the Spanish site. To have this work with the “hreflang”, you identify the country code as well as the language code. There is a list that Google provides where you can find which one references each language and each country. Before XML sitemap you had to manually mark up the page itself and do every single header on every single page. This is a newer feature.
“Previously it was a big problem when you actually had sites in multiple different languages and not the correct results showing up and there was no actual way to tell Google to stop this. Google has been getting smarter and smarter every day but now that it actually has a straight way to tell them I think that it would be really easy to comply with that.” –Avinash Conda
