Implementation of Hreflang in international site

[jediviper]

We have a .com property with many visitors from different countries and languages (for example Australia, Germany, Netherlands).

Our current hreflang seems really problematic as it's at this format:
<li><a href="/?locale=en-EU" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>EN</span> <i class='flag-en-EU'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=en-AU" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>AU</span> <i class='flag-en-AU'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=de-DE" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>DE</span> <i class='flag-de-DE'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=es-ES" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>ES</span> <i class='flag-es-ES'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=fr-FR" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>FR</span> <i class='flag-fr-FR'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=no-NO" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>NO</span> <i class='flag-no-NO'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=ru-RU" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>RU</span> <i class='flag-ru-RU'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=fi-FI" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>FI</span> <i class='flag-fi-FI'></i></a></li>
<li><a href="/?locale=sv-SE" hreflang="en-EU"><span class='iso'>SE</span> <i class='flag-sv-SE'></i></a></li>

which I guess it's related to the selection of language through a drop down menu that we have, by selecting the appropriate Flag icon.

I believe that we should use the XML sitemaps and try to introduce something like this:
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/uk/</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en"
href="http://www.example.com/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au"
href="http://www.example.com/au/" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb"
href="http://www.example.com/uk/" />
</url>

Any other suggestions?

[Dimitri]

[support.google.com...]

[Juli_Schez]

hi, i have a question. i'm studying a postgraduate degree of seo and ppc and i have a case study. it's an invented university which has campuses across the world and the teacher has asked us to do an seo audit. i've completed it but there's one thing i'm not sure of, it's regarding the hreflang tags. So I said it's better to have an hrefland attribute on each subdomain (considering it has a subdomain per campus) but what about the online campus? Should i just leave it out and just put the lang tag? Any help will be much appreciated! :)

[brighteryeg]

The ahrefs blog overviewed this fairly neatly.

[ahrefs.com...]

[RedBar]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld Juli_Schez

i'm studying a postgraduate degree of seo and ppc

I'll ask the question:-)

Where?

I don't need the specifics, which country ?

Honestly, I'm naïve, this actually exists?

[Juli_Schez]

In Spain.

[RedBar]

Spain ... interesting:-)

Whilst the two earlier links are relevant I have to say that my preferred method for handing multiple language websites is simply to buy a domain of the target language country and construct the site on it.

G is is still good enough to recognise a Spanish / German / French / Russian / etc language site and rank them in those countries that use those languages however I can bet someone will say that Portuguese is not that well-handled!

Sometimes I offer the option on sites to click through to the alternative language sites however these days I tend to prefer them to be stand-alone.

It's all well and good teaching what may be possible, or is considered best practice, but when the reality comes to the day-to-day ranking of a website, code cleanliness and unambiguity is paramount.

In other words, give G the opportunity to make a mess of understanding your site and it will undoubtedly do so.

[Juli_Schez]

but what would you say about the online site? it'd be correct to leave it out right? i mean, i don't see any other way to do it. can't use it as x-default neither can i assign it a territory, it'd be a global site in english so just add lang would be fine right. This is how the code looks right now:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.mysite.com" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://www.uk.mysite.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.fr.mysite.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="https://www.es.mysite.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.online.mysite.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.mysite.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

I haven't seen any examples on this yet so I'm not sure. But this is the only logical way I see of putting it.

[Juli_Schez]

hi, any comments on my previous comment? do you think it's correct?

[goodroi]

There are two different answers - what your professor wants to hear and what will actually work in the real world.

In the real world Google tends to ignore hreflang. Too many webmasters have bought a website template that had the hreflang pre-filled in and they didn't change it. So now Google regularly crawls websites with English content and hreflang=FR & similar situations. That is why Google tends to ignore it. In my humble opinion, from an SEO perspective hreflang is a borderline hindrance because to a lesser issue it can contribute to code bloat/slow down page speed but more importantly it distracts a webmaster from working on much more impactful changes to improve their SEO.

[RedBar]

do you think it's correct?

The examples you have given are the same as used by Instagram therefore a reasonably good chance of being correct if you want to use them:-)