If you are targeting users in more than one country, chances are you already heard about rel-alternate-hreflang. If you haven't, in short, this annotation enables Google and other search engines to serve the correct language or regional version of pages to searchers, which can lead to increased user satisfaction.

Making sure the deployed annotations are usable by search engines can be rather difficult, especially on sites with many pages, and site owners all around the world haven’t been shy telling us about this. Today we're releasing a feature that should make debugging rel-alternate-hreflang annotations much easier.

The Language Targeting section in the International Targeting feature enables you to identify two of the most common issues with hreflang annotations:

• Missing return links: annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly.
  For each error of this kind we report where and when we detected them, as well as where the return link is expected to be.

• Incorrect hreflang values: The value of the hreflang attribute must either be a language code in ISO 639-1 format such as "es", or a combination of language and country code such as "es-AR", where the country code is in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format.
  In case our indexing systems detect language or country codes that are not in these formats, we provide example URLs to help you fix them.

Additionally, we've moved the geographic targeting setting to this part of Webmaster Tools, so that you can find all information relevant to international and multilingual targeting in the same place.

We hope you'll find this new feature useful and that it helps you to identify issues with the rel-hreflang-implementation on your site. If you have comments or questions about the feature, please post in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends

If you are doing business in more than one country or targeting different languages, we recommend having separate sites or sections with specific content on each URLs targeted for individual countries or languages. For instance one page for US and english-speaking visitors, and a different page for France and french-speaking users. While we have information on handling multi-regional and multilingual sites, the homepage can be a bit special. This post will help you create the right homepage on your website to serve the appropriate content to users depending on their language and location.

There are three ways to configure your homepage / landing page when your users access it:

• Show everyone the same content.
• Let users choose.
• Serve content depending on users’ localization and language.

Let’s have a look at each in detail.

Show users worldwide the same content 

In this scenario, you decide to serve specific content for one given country and language on your homepage / generic URL (http://www.example.com). This content will be available to anyone who accesses that URL directly in their browser or those who search for that URL specifically. As mentioned above, all country & language versions should also be accessible on their own unique URLs.

Note: You can show a banner on your page to suggest a more appropriate version to users from other locations or with different language settings.

Let users choose which local version and which language they want 

In this configuration, you decide to serve a country selector page on your homepage / generic URL and to let users choose which content they want to see depending on country and language. All users who type in that URL can access the same page.

If you implement this scenario on your international site, remember to use the x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation for the country selector page, which was specifically created for these kinds of pages. The x-default value helps us recognize pages that are not specific to one language or region.

Automatically redirect users or dynamically serve the appropriate HTML content depending on users’ location and language settings

A third scenario would be to automatically serve the appropriate HTML content to your users depending on their location and language settings. You will either do that by using server-side 302 redirects or by dynamically serving the right HTML content.

Remember to use x-default rel-alternate-hreflang annotation on the homepage / generic page even if the latter is a redirect page that is not accessible directly for users.

Note: Think about redirecting users for whom you do not have a specific version. For instance, French-speaking users on a website that has English, Spanish and Chinese versions. Show them the content that you consider the most appropriate.

Whatever configuration you decide to go with, you should make sure all the pages – including country and language selector pages:

• Have rel-alternate-hreflang annotations.
• Are accessible for Googlebot's crawling and indexing: do not block the crawling or indexing of your localized pages.
• Always allow users to switch local version or language: you can do that using a drop down menu for instance.

Reminder: As mentioned in the beginning, remember that you must have separate URLs for each country and language version. 

About rel-alternate-hreflang annotations

Remember to annotate all your pages - whatever method you choose. This will greatly help search engines to show the right results to your users.

Country selector pages and redirecting or dynamically serving homepages should all use the x-default hreflang, which was specifically designed for auto-redirecting homepages and country selectors. 

Finally, here are a few useful reminders about rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in general:

• Your annotations must be confirmed from the other pages. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise, your annotations may not be interpreted correctly.
• Your annotations should be self-referential. Page A should use rel-alternate-hreflang annotation linking to itself.
• You can specify the rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in the HTTP header, in the head section of the HTML, or in a sitemap file. We strongly recommend that you choose only one way to implement the annotations, in order to avoid inconsistent signals and errors.
• The value of the hreflang attribute must be in ISO 639-1 format for the language, and in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for the region. Specifying only the region is not supported. If you wish to configure your site only for a country, use the geotargeting feature in Webmaster Tools. 

Following these recommendations will help us better understand your localized content and serve more relevant results to your users in our search results. As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the internationalization Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends Analysts.

Webmaster Level: All

The homepages of multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages, either via redirects or by changing the content to reflect the user’s language. Today we’ll introduce a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that the webmaster can use to specify such homepages that is supported by both Google and Yandex.

To see this in action, let’s look at an example. The website example.com has content that targets users around the world as follows:

• http://example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
• http://example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
• http://example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
• http://example.com/: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide

In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using rel-alternate-hreflang using Sitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited. For example, it would be the page our algorithms try to show French-speaking searchers worldwide or English-speaking searchers on google.ca.

The same annotation applies for homepages that dynamically alter their contents based on a user’s perceived geolocation or the Accept-Language headers. The x-default hreflang value signals to our algorithms that such a page doesn’t target a specific language or locale.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please tell us in the Internationalization Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst