Today we're going further with our support for multilingual content with improved handling for these two scenarios:
- Multiregional websites using substantially the same content. Example: English webpages for Australia, Canada and USA, differing only in price
- Multiregional websites using fully translated content, or substantially different monolingual content targeting different regions. Example: a product webpage in German, English and French
Annotating pages as substantially similar content Optionally, for pages that have substantially the same content in the same language and are targeted at multiple countries, you may use the rel="canonical" link element to specify your preferred version. We’ll use that signal to focus on that version in search, while showing the local URLs to users where appropriate. For example, you could use this if you have the same product page in German, but want to target it separately to users searching on the Google properties for Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.
Example usage To explain how it works, let’s look at some example URLs:
- http://www.example.com/ - contains the general homepage of a website, in Spanish
- http://es-es.example.com/ - is the version for users in Spain, in Spanish
- http://es-mx.example.com/ - is the version for users in Mexico, in Spanish
- http://en.example.com/ - is the generic English language version
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://www.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-ES" href="http://es-es.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-MX" href="http://es-mx.example.com/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://en.example.com/" />
Keep in mind that all of these annotations are to be used on a per-URL basis. You should take care to use the specific URL, not the homepage, for both of these link elements.
More help As always, if you need more help correctly implementing multiregional and multilingual websites, please see our Help Center article about this topic, or ask in our Webmaster Help Forum.
Written by Christopher Semturs, Software Engineer, Search Infrastructure, Google Switzerland
