• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. International SEO
        4. Hreflang Alternate & Pagination

        Moz Q&A is closed.

        After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

        Hreflang Alternate & Pagination

        International SEO
        4
        7
        4844
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • ABullis
          ABullis last edited by

          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.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • gfiorelli1
            gfiorelli1 @NickJasuja last edited by

            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.

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • NickJasuja
              NickJasuja @detco last edited by

              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.

              gfiorelli1 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
              • detco
                detco @NickJasuja last edited by

                "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 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                • NickJasuja
                  NickJasuja last edited by

                  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.

                  detco 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote -1
                  • ABullis
                    ABullis @gfiorelli1 last edited by

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

                    1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
                    • gfiorelli1
                      gfiorelli1 last edited by

                      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.

                      ABullis 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
                      • 1 / 1
                      • First post
                        Last post

                      Browse Questions

                      Explore more categories

                      • Moz Tools

                        Chat with the community about the Moz tools.

                      • SEO Tactics

                        Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers

                      • Community

                        Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!

                      • Digital Marketing

                        Chat about tactics outside of SEO

                      • Research & Trends

                        Dive into research and trends in the search industry.

                      • Support

                        Connect on product support and feature requests.

                      • See all categories

                      Related Questions

                      • moon-boots

                        Traffic drop after hreflang tags added

                        We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers. thespacecollective.com (EU customers) thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers) We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice); EU site (thespacecollective.com) US site (thespacecollective.com/us/) Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good. This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?

                        International SEO | | moon-boots
                        0
                      • Netleaf.ca

                        Worldwide and Europe hreflang implementation.

                        Hi Moz ! We're having quite a discussion here and I'd like to have some inputs. Let me explain the situation and what we plan to do so far. One of our client has two separate markets : World and Europe. Both pages versions will be mostly the same, except for the fact that they will have their own products. So basically, we'd want to show only the European EN version to Europe and the standard EN version to the rest of the world, same goes for FR and ES. As far as IT, DE, CS and SK, they will only be present within the european version. Since we cannot target all Europe with a single hreflang tag, we might have to do it for every single european countries. Regarding this subject, SMX Munich recently had quite an interesting session about this topic with a confirmation coming from John Mueller saying that we can target a single URL more than once with different hreflang tags. You can read more here : http://www.rebelytics.com/multiple-hreflang-tags-one-url/ So having all this in mind, here's the implementation we plan to do : www.example.com/en/ Self canonical www.example.com/fr/ - hreflang = fr www.example.com/es/ - hreflang = es www.example.eu/it/ - hreflang = it www.example.eu/de/ - hreflang = de www.example.eu/cs/ - hreflang = cs www.example.eu/sk/ - hreflang = sk www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = be-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = ch-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = cz-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = de-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = es-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = fr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = uk-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = gr-fr www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = hr-fr etc… . This will be done for all european countries (FR, EN and ES). www.example.com/en/ - x-default Let me know what you guys think. Thanks!

                        International SEO | | Netleaf.ca
                        0
                      • DigitalThirdCoast

                        Hreflang tag on every page?

                        Hello Moz Community, I'm working with a client who has translated their top 50 landing pages into Spanish. It's a large website and we don't have the resources to properly translate all pages at once, so we started with the top 50. We've already translated the content, title tags, URLs, etc. and the content will live in it's own /es-us/ directory. The client's website is set up in a way that all content follows a URL structure such as: https://www.example.com/en-us/. For Page A, it will live in English at: https://www.example.com/en-us/page-a For Page A, it will live in Spanish at https://www.example.com/es-us/page-a ("page-a" may vary since that part of the URL is translated) From my research in the Moz forums and Webmaster Support Console, I've written the following hreflang tags: /> For Page B, it will follow the same structure as Page A, and I wrote the corresponding hreflang tags the same way. My question is, do both of these tags need to be on both the Spanish and English version of the page? Or, would I put the "en-us" hreflang tag on the Spanish page and the "es-us" hreflang tag on the English page? I'm thinking that both hreflang tags should be on both the Spanish and English pages, but would love some clarification/confirmation from someone that has implemented this successfully before.

                        International SEO | | DigitalThirdCoast
                        0
                      • SimonByrneIFS

                        Can you target the same site with multiple country HREFlang entries?

                        Hi, I have a question regarding the country targeting aspect of HREFLANG. Can the same site be targeted with multiple country HREFlang entries? Example: A global company has an English South African site (geotargeted in webmaster tools to South Africa), with a hreflang entry targeted to "en-za", to signify English language and South Africa as the country. Could you add entries to the same site to target other English speaking South African countries? Entries would look something like this: (cd = Congo, a completely random example) etc... Since you can only geo-target a site to one country in WMT would this be a viable option? Thanks in advance for any help! Vince

                        International SEO | | SimonByrneIFS
                        0
                      • DA2013

                        Can multiple hreflang tags point to one URL? International SEO question

                        Moz, Hi Moz, Can multiple hreflang tags point to a single URL?  For example, if I have a Canadian site (www.example.com/ca) that targets French and English speakers can I have the following: or would I use: Any insight would be very helpful and greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance!

                        International SEO | | DA2013
                        1
                      • peteboyd

                        What is the proper way to setup hreflang tags on my English and Spanish site?

                        I have a full English website at http://www.example.com and I have a Spanish version of the website at http://spanish.example.com but only about half of the English pages were translated and exist on the Spanish site. Should I just add a sitemap to both sites with hreflang tags that point to the correct version of the page? Is this a proper way to set this up? I was going to repeat this same process for all of the applicable URLs that exist on both versions of the website (English and Spanish). Is it okay to have hreflang="es" or do I need to have a country code attached as well? There are many Spanish speaking countries and I don't know if I need to list them all out. For example hreflang="es-bo" (Bolivia), hreflang="es-cl" (Chile), hreflang="es-co" (Columbia), etc... Sitemap example for English website URL:
                        <url><loc>http://www.example.com/</loc></url> Sitemap example for Spanish website URL:
                        <url><loc>http://spanish.example.com/</loc></url> Thanks in advance for your feedback and help!

                        International SEO | | peteboyd
                        0
                      • Ben.JD

                        If I redirect based on IP will Google still crawl my international sites if I implement Hreflang

                        We are setting up several international sites. Ideally, we wouldn't set up any redirects, but if we have to (for merchandising reasons etc) I'd like to assess what the next best option would be. A secondary option could be that we implement the redirects based on IP. However, Google then wouldn't be able to access the content for all the international sites (we're setting up 6 in total) and would only index the .com site. I'm wondering whether the Hreflang annotations would still allow Google to find the International sites? If not, that's a lot of content we are not fully benefiting from. Another option could be that we treat the Googlebot user agent differently, but this would probably be considered as cloaking by the G-Man. If there are any other options, please let me know.

                        International SEO | | Ben.JD
                        0
                      • MarloSchneider

                        Cross domain rel alternate, will it help or hurt?

                        I have a website that has similar pages on a US version and a UK version. Currently we want Uk traffic to go to the US, but the US domain is so strong it is outranking the UK in the UK. We want to try using rel alternate but have some concerns. Currently for some of our keywords US is #1, UK is #4. If we implement rel alternate, will it just remove our US page? We don't want to shoot ourselves in the foot and lose traffic. Is this worth doing, will it just remove our US ranking and our double listing? Any anecdotes, experiences or opinions are appreciated. Thanks.

                        International SEO | | MarloSchneider
                        0

                      Get started with Moz Pro!

                      Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                      Start my free trial
                      Products
                      • Moz Pro
                      • Moz Local
                      • Moz API
                      • Moz Data
                      • STAT
                      • Product Updates
                      Moz Solutions
                      • SMB Solutions
                      • Agency Solutions
                      • Enterprise Solutions
                      • Digital Marketers
                      Free SEO Tools
                      • Domain Authority Checker
                      • Link Explorer
                      • Keyword Explorer
                      • Competitive Research
                      • Brand Authority Checker
                      • Local Citation Checker
                      • MozBar Extension
                      • MozCast
                      Resources
                      • Blog
                      • SEO Learning Center
                      • Help Hub
                      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                      • How-to Guides
                      • Moz Academy
                      • API Docs
                      About Moz
                      • About
                      • Team
                      • Careers
                      • Contact
                      Why Moz
                      • Case Studies
                      • Testimonials
                      Get Involved
                      • Become an Affiliate
                      • MozCon
                      • Webinars
                      • Practical Marketer Series
                      • MozPod
                      Connect with us

                      Contact the Help team

                      Join our newsletter
                      Moz logo
                      © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                      • Accessibility
                      • Terms of Use
                      • Privacy

                      Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.