International Blog Structure & Hreflang Tag

[Vulcan229]

Hi all,

I'm running an international website across 3 regions using a correct hreflang setup.

A problem I think I have, is that my blog structure is not standardized and also uses hreflang tags for each blog article.

This has naturally caused Google to index each of the pages across each region, meaning a massive amount of pages are being crawled.

I know hreflang solves and issues with duplication penalties, but I have another question.

If I have legacy blog articles that are considered low quality by Google, is that counting against my site once or multiple times for each time the blog is replicated across each region? I'm not sure if hreflang is something that would tell Google this.

For example, if I have low quality blog posts:

blog/en-us/low-quality-article-1
blog/en-gb/low-quality-article-1
blog/en-ca/low-quality-article-1

Do you think Google is counting this as 3 low quality articles or just 1, if hreflang is correctly implemented?

Any insights would be great because I'm considering to cull the international setup of the blog articles and use just /blog across each region, but don't want to lose any ranking momentum.

[goodroi]

I'd think of it this way ... if I have a gunshot wound does Google count that as 1 wound or 3 wounds? It doesn't matter - you are wounded.

I would personally prefer to consolidate the pages for ease of maintenance, streamlining internal link flow, & crawl budget reasons. Depending on your site those could be very minor reasons or major reasons. Then I'd go through culling the pages. Really weak pages (like how to pour a glass of water) I'd delete. Poor pages on good topics, I'd rewrite & expand into a quality resource. Good pages, I'd review to make sure they are still current & up to date with schema opportunities & other tech. That's what I would do if it was my site.

[broccoli]

I've seen SEOs complaining about what they refer to as "hreflang spam", because Google currently treats these as links and is giving them a boost in the search.

Is all the content unique to each region, or is it the same article duplicated three times? If the latter, when Google finally catches up with this issue, you might be at risk for getting a penalty from it, but right now it's probably helping you.

I can't specifically say whether Google would count these as three articles or one when assessing you with Panda, but it would also count all of your other articles in the same way. I believe you can get away with a percentage of low quality pages, but I don't know what that percentage is.

I would clean up your low quality articles before Google notices them, it's easier to do it now than deal with it if you get hit by a penalty.