Specialist

International & Multilingual SEO

Hreflang, country targeting and the duplicate-content traps that come with running the same site in several languages.

What usually goes wrong

The same content in three languages is three chances to be misunderstood. Hreflang is easy to get almost right, and almost right means the wrong country sees the wrong page.

You would notice

UK visitors landing on the US page
Language versions competing with each other
A translated site that never ranked in its own market
Hreflang added by a plugin that nobody has validated

The work

International & Multilingual SEO, line by line.

Each line is work that gets done and can be checked afterwards. None of it is a promise about where you will rank — nobody can honestly make that one.

01Hreflang written and validated, including self-references
02Country and language targeting matched to how the site is actually split
03Duplicate content across regions resolved
04URL structure chosen deliberately: subfolder, subdomain or ccTLD
05Local search behaviour checked per market, not assumed

In practice

Every version points at all the others, including itself

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://example.com/uk/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de" href="https://example.com/de/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />

Rules that are easy to break:
  - every page in the set lists every other page AND itself
  - the return links must be reciprocal, or the set is dropped
  - language first, region second: en-gb, never gb-en

The self-reference is the one most often missing, and without it the whole set is ignored.

Questions

Asked often enough to answer here.

Subfolder, subdomain or separate domain?

Subfolders, in almost every case. They inherit the authority you already have; separate domains start from nothing, three times over.

Do I need hreflang for the same language in two countries?

Yes, and that is the case it exists for. en-us and en-gb are the textbook example.

Is machine translation acceptable?

As a starting point, edited by someone who speaks the language. Unedited, it reads as what it is, and it ranks accordingly.

Also in Specialist

Work that usually travels with it.

Contact

Want international & multilingual seo on your site?

We will look at it and come back with what we would do and what it would cost. If we are not the right fit for it, we will say that instead.