Hreflang Alternate & Pagination

[ABullis]

Hi everybody,

So I'm setting up hreflang tags on an ecommerce site. The sites are in the USA and Canada. The Canadian site will have fewer products than the American site, meaning that there won't be as many pages in each category as there are on the American site. What is the correct way to handle hreflang tags on these extra category pages?

To put this another way, the American site may have a category with 3 pages of products, while the Canadian equivalent only has 2 pages of products. What happens to this extra American category page (example.com/widget-category/page-3) ?

Does it get an hreflang tag linking to the first page of the equivalent Canadian category (example.ca/widget-category/)?

Does it not get any hreflang tags because it has no true Canadian counterpart?

Does it matter at all if it has a canonical tag pointing to the first page in the series anyway (example**.com**/widget-category/)?

Thanks,

Andrew B.

[gfiorelli1]

Canonicals and hreflangs must be treated separately.

My rule, and this what I said at LearnInbound, from where SEMRush tweeted the tweet you embedded in your post, is this:

1. First set up and/or solve all canonicalization issues your site may have;

2. Once you have solved the canonicalization issues, you can work on implementing the hreflang only on canonical URLs (not canonicalized)

In that case of pagination the pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al have self-referential rel="canonical", so - ideally - the hreflang must reference to the corresponding pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al of the same pagination in the other country and/or language version.

Finally, you are correct regarding the "view all" being the canonical URL of a paginated series.

[NickJasuja]

You are right. I didn't know about the right way to paginate with canonical. But the point about Hreflang stands. Don't use Hreflang and canonical together on the same page. If you are using canonical to point to the "View All" version, then use Hreflang on the "View all" versions, and not on the individual pages.

[detco]

"Page-2 and Page-3 on the US site should use rel canonical to point to US Page-1. And Page-2 on CA site should use rel canonical to point to Page-1 on CA."

Sorry to say, but this is wrong. Having this configuration will lead the Googlebot to not index or follow anything on page-2 or page-3 because only page-1 is the canonical page. Use either canonical to "page-all" (if existent) or rel="prev"/"next" (sometimes useful with Robots-Tag with noindex,follow for page-2, page-3 ...)

See > Mistake 1: rel=canonical to the first page of a paginated series
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html#

[NickJasuja]

Don't use canonical and hreflang together. I blogged about this very issue: https://hreflang.org/use-hreflang-canonical-together/

What this means for you is that even for Page-2 (for both US and CA), if you are using rel canonical to say that Page-2 is a duplicate of Page-1, then do not use hreflang on Page-2. Using both canonical and hreflang on page-2 will only confuse Googlebot.

In your case, only use hreflang on the canonical versions of the page. i.e., Page-1 on both US and CA sites should point to each other using hreflang. Page-2 and Page-3 on the US site should use rel canonical to point to US Page-1. And Page-2 on CA site should use rel canonical to point to Page-1 on CA.

[ABullis]

That makes perfect sense! Thanks Gianluca (hope to see you at Mozcon again this year btw!).

[gfiorelli1]

The example.com/widget-category/page-3 URL cannot have as href in its hreflang="en-CA" the example.ca/widget-category/page-1 because also this other URL - example.com/widget-category/page-1 - has that Canadian URL as href (moreover, that is the correct href for its hreflang="en-CA").

Hence, if you follow your first idea, you will be having a URL (the canadian first page of the paginated list) that will have two different hreflang annotations ( <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-1" hreflang="en-US">and <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-3" hreflang="en-US">, which is totally uncorrect, because you are telling Google to use two URLs for English speaking users in the USA, instead of one.</rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">

Sincerely I wouldn't worry that much. If you are using the rel="prev"/"next", Google will consider the third page of the US listing as a all with the first two pages, hence it should not start showing it in the index.