An SEO professional was concerned about their hreflang international targeting.
They set up a business for the past 10 or 15 years or so. They have a dot com in the United States. And recently in the past two years, they started on India, Australia, and Mexico.
They also purchased some ccTLDs, and set up a different website.
However, they ended up getting business from the United States version, but they haven’t set up any hreflang for the other websites. They also have no authority for India, Australia, and Mexico.
Their main question to John Mueller was: should they add the hreflang tags to these sites and will it help their ranking?
John Mueller answered that no, the hreflang tag would not change any rankings of these pages.
The only function of this tag is to make sure that the preferred version is actually shown in the search results.
If different country versions exist, such as if they are in English or the same language, then hreflang makes it easier for Google to understand and show the best matching page for the user’s search query.
If you’re seeing the wrong version in the search results, then it’s a strong sign that the hreflang is going to be useful and could be a solution to the problem.
This happens at approximately the 14:11 mark in the video.
John Mueller Hangout Transcript
My question is on international targeting. So like we have set up a business for the last 10 to 15 years, and we have a dot com for the United States. Recently, in the past two years, we have started for India, Australia and Mexico, and we have purchased some ccTLDs. And we set up a different website for but initially what happened, we are getting the business from the dot com website, and we have not set up the hreflang side to the other websites. And they also have no authority for India, Australia, Mexico. So should we add that tag right now? Or is there anything for the ranking?
John 15:04
So the hreflang wouldn’t change the ranking of these pages, it would just make sure that the preferred version is shown in the search results. So especially if you have different country versions in English in the same language, then the hreflang makes it a little bit easier for us to show the best matching version for that user. So if you’re seeing the wrong version shown in the search results, like if someone is searching in Australia, and I see the Indian version, then that’s a pretty strong sign that the hreflang would be useful. If they’re mostly seeing the right version already in search, then probably the hreflang is not critical.
SEO Professional 5 15:47
Yes, this is the scenario: our dot com is ranking for the Indian version, also in the Indian web’s region. But we want to run a dot ng website [inaudible]. So if we install that hreflang tag right now for the dot in website. So do we get the same ranking for the dot in website?
John 16:07
Yes, it would swap out the URL. So instead of the.com being shown, it would show the dot Indian version.
