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.
Using hreflang="en" instead of hreflang="en-gb"
-
Hello,
I have a question in regard to international SEO and the hreflang meta tag. We are currently a B2B business in the UK. Our major market is England with some exceptions of sales internationally.
We are wanting to increase our ranking into other english speaking countries and regions such as Ireland and the Channel Islands.
My research has found regional google search engines for Ireland (google.ie), Jersey (google.je) and Guernsey (google.gg).
Now, all the regions have English as one their main language and here is my questions.
Because I use hreflang=“en-gb” as my site language, am I regional excluding these countries and islands? If I used hreflang=“en” would it include these english speaking regions and possible increase the ranking on these the regional search engines?
Thank you,
-
The .co.uk domain is already geo-targeted to the UK, so unless you are targeting other countries/languages
-
I am going to use https://www.ukassignment.co.uk"> for my website I hope it is help to work in UK.
-
From my understanding if you have hreflang=“en-gb” then that/those pages are targeted at the UK. If you wish to target any English speaking countries then you add hreflang=“en”. But if you wish to target specific English speaking countries then you'd use hreflang="en-ie", hreflang="en-gg" etc.
What you are doing is giving Google information, not a directive, as to what pages are targeted for where. Google could ignore and it's not a ranking solution. You are just giving Google the heads up of your intentions.
-
Hi,
According to this article by Moz on hreflang, yes, having an hreflang tag with the language only will help you cast your net out to English speaking searchers from other regions.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
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.
Related Questions
-
What is best practice for "Sorting" URLs to prevent indexing and for best link juice ?
We are now introducing 5 links in all our category pages for different sorting options of category listings.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lcourse
The site has about 100.000 pages and with this change the number of URLs may go up to over 350.000 pages.
Until now google is indexing well our site but I would like to prevent the "sorting URLS" leading to less complete crawling of our core pages, especially since we are planning further huge expansion of pages soon. Apart from blocking the paramter in the search console (which did not really work well for me in the past to prevent indexing) what do you suggest to minimize indexing of these URLs also taking into consideration link juice optimization? On a technical level the sorting is implemented in a way that the whole page is reloaded, for which may be better options as well.0 -
Competitor Title, can I use the same???
there are some pages, my competitor is ranking well and also, we have done page optimization it is 100% for page title keywords as im going to use the same title of the competitor? Will this affect me? Pls suggest wht should I do..
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rahim1190 -
Should pages with rel="canonical" be put in a sitemap?
I am working on an ecommerce site and I am going to add different views to the category pages. The views will all have different urls so I would like to add the rel="canonical" tag to them. Should I still add these pages to the sitemap?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
"noindex, follow" or "robots.txt" for thin content pages
Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great. I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
"Jump to" Links in Google, how do you get them?
I have just seen yoast.com results in Google and noticed that nearly all the indexed pages show a "Jump to" link So instead of showing the full URL under the title tag, it shows these type of links yoast.com › SEO
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JohnPeters
yoast.com › Social Media
yoast.com › Analytics With the SEO, Social Media and Analytics all being clickable. How has he achieved this? And is it something to try and incorporate in my sites?0 -
Meta Keywords: Should we use them or not?
I am working through our site and see that meta keywords are being used heavily and unnecessarily. Each of our info pages will have 2 or 3 keyword phrases built into them. Should we just duplicate the keyword phrases into the meta keyword field, should put in additional keywords beyond or not use it at all? Thoughts and opinions appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Towelsrus1 -
How Google treat internal links with rel="nofollow"?
Today, I was reading about NoFollow on Wikipedia. Following statement is over my head and not able to understand with proper manner. "Google states that their engine takes "nofollow" literally and does not "follow" the link at all. However, experiments conducted by SEOs show conflicting results. These studies reveal that Google does follow the link, but does not index the linked-to page, unless it was in Google's index already for other reasons (such as other, non-nofollow links that point to the page)." It's all about indexing and ranking for specific keywords for hyperlink text during external links. I aware about that section. It may not generate in relevant result during any keyword on Google web search. But, what about internal links? I have defined rel="nofollow" attribute on too many internal links. I have archive blog post of Randfish with same subject. I read following question over there. Q. Does Google recommend the use of nofollow internally as a positive method for controlling the flow of internal link love? [In 2007] A: Yes – webmasters can feel free to use nofollow internally to help tell Googlebot which pages they want to receive link juice from other pages
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
_
(Matt's precise words were: The nofollow attribute is just a mechanism that gives webmasters the ability to modify PageRank flow at link-level granularity. Plenty of other mechanisms would also work (e.g. a link through a page that is robot.txt'ed out), but nofollow on individual links is simpler for some folks to use. There's no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow'ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don't even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.) Matt has given excellent answer on following question. [In 2011] Q: Should internal links use rel="nofollow"? A:Matt said: "I don't know how to make it more concrete than that." I use nofollow for each internal link that points to an internal page that has the meta name="robots" content="noindex" tag. Why should I waste Googlebot's ressources and those of my server if in the end the target must not be indexed? As far as I can say and since years, this does not cause any problems at all. For internal page anchors (links with the hash mark in front like "#top", the answer is "no", of course. I am still using nofollow attributes on my website. So, what is current trend? Will it require to use nofollow attribute for internal pages?0 -
All page files in root? Or to use directories?
We have thousands of pages on our website; news articles, forum topics, download pages... etc - and at present they all reside in the root of the domain /. For example: /aosta-valley-i6816.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter264
/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html We are considering moving over to a new URL system where we use directories. For example, the above URLs would be the following: /images/aosta-valley-i6816.html
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde-d1101.html
/forums/what-is-best-addon-t3360.html Would we have any benefit in using directories for SEO purposes? Would our current system perhaps mean too many files in the root / flagging as spammy? Would it be even better to use the following system which removes file endings completely and suggests each page is a directory: /images/aosta-valley/6816/
/downloads/flight-sim-concorde/1101/
/forums/what-is-best-addon/3360/ If so, what would be better: /images/aosta-valley/6816/ or /images/6816/aosta-valley/ Just looking for some clarity to our problem! Thank you for your help guys!0
