December 12, 2022

Understanding the Purpose of Hreflang

There seems to be persistent confusion about the purpose of using hreflang on your website and what it does and does not do. In this post, I will explain the purpose and why it is more critical to implement correctly than most global website owners understand. Google’s Purpose of Hreflang […]
October 18, 2022

Hreflang Deployments Simplified

In a perfect scenario, the organization deploys a hreflang solution for all sites within a brand family and deploys hreflang for them simultaneously.  Given the complexities of deploying hreflang at an enterprise level, most organizations should consider a phased roll-out plan focusing on where the problem is the most acute […]
September 28, 2022

Why Google Needs to Support hreflang

There is an interesting set of threads on Twitter and some comments on Reddit about the value of hreflang and due to the recent depreciation of the International Targeting report, does Google still need to support hreflang. There were also comments that “Google Should be able to use some of […]
September 28, 2022

Understanding Cross-Market SERP Cannibalization

 Some Marketers are happy to have any page ranking well in the search results and often do not consider the negative implications when non-market sites rank higher than the local market in the SERPS.   We call this Cross-Market SERP Cannibalization. SERP cannibalization occurs when a market-specific page ranks or outranks […]
September 13, 2022

IP Detection and HrefLang

The purpose of this post is to address a growing problem where Regional Growth Managers double-down on IP detection as a way to decrease shopping cart abandonment. In some regions like Latin America and the Asia Pacific, shopping cart abandonment can be as high as 87%. To reduce this abandonment, […]
September 13, 2022

GSC International Targeting Tool Depreciation

Earlier this week, Google announced on Twitter they were finally sunsetting their International Targeting tool and hreflang reports.  If you go to the Legacy Tools & Reports and click on International Targeting, you will see the headline noting depreciation on September 22, 2022.  There is a link to a similar […]
July 21, 2022

Does HREFLang help with Indexing?

Earlier this week Gus Pelogia posted a very interesting question/statement on Twitter asking if Hreflang helps with indexing. He also posted the results of a test where he stated that 93% of the previously missing pages were now indexed, and a later post indicated that they continued to be indexed […]
September 14, 2021

Deploying HREFLANG when the global site does not want to participate

I am encountering more and more cases of large multinational sites are markets, especially dominant markets, resist hreflang implementation or being fixed as they fear it may cannibalize their traffic numbers.  This often happens due to these sites may have been around longer and/or have more authority or relevance. In […]