How can hreflang tags affect technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the art of improving your website’s performance in search engines, which includes a focus on content and links. One of the most important factors is hreflang tags, which are used to help search engines understand the language and location of your web pages. Without hreflang tags, your website could appear in the wrong SERPs for users searching in a different language or region, and this can cause issues with your ranking, traffic and conversions.
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1. Make a mistake with the hreflang tag implementation.
Often, website owners implement hreflang tags in the HTML head> or XML sitemap, but they’re not implementing them correctly. This can lead to a number of problems, including duplicate content and incorrect web positioning.
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Use a hreflang tag in the header o on your pages.
Whenever you create a new page or edit an existing one, you’ll need to include a hreflang tag to let search engines know what language you are targeting. The tag is inserted into the head of the HTML document and it must be included for every language or country on your website.
3. Overuse of hreflang attributes.
If you have many different versions of your website with the same content, it can be difficult for search engines to determine which version is correct and which isn’t. This can cause a variety of SEO problems, such as multiple pages with the same content ranking in the search engine results page (SERP) or confusing the titles of these pages.
4. Don’t overuse hreflang attributes.
A lot of webmasters tend to implement hreflang tags in the header o on their pages, but they’re not implementing them in the correct manner. This can lead to a number of SEO problems, including duplicate content and incorrect web positioning.
5. Don’t use hreflangs for duplicated content.
Duplicated content is a huge problem for websites, as it can lead to Google penalizing you for duplicate content. Fortunately, there are a few ways to avoid this problem, including using hreflangs to prevent your pages from showing up in searches for the same phrase in different languages.
6. Overuse of hreflang attributes.
A lot more complex than it might sound, hreflang attributes can be used to indicate which version of a page is the preferred one. This is important for avoiding issues with duplicate content and for helping Google and other search engines understand your website better.
The most common hreflang attribute is hreflang=”x-default”. This will tell search engines that they should send traffic that doesn’t fit into the languages or regions you’ve already specified to a more generic landing page.
7. Overuse of hreflang attributes.
The hreflang tag can be implemented in the HTML head> or an XML sitemap, but it isn’t the best method for implementing it. This is because it can be a bit of a time-consuming process to ensure that all variants of your URLs are marked up properly, and it’s also possible to confuse search engines by adding too many variants of the same hreflang tag.
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