Free Hreflang Demystified Course

This week, we launched our new Hreflang Demystified course to increase awareness of Hreflang. The first segment of the course goes into detail (rant) explaining why we created the course. It came from many months of frustration attending conferences, reading articles, and dealing with clients and prospects. The main reasons for the course are:

• Eliminate the confusion and misunderstanding of hreflang elements
• Explain the actual purpose of hreflang and why it is necessary.
• Review the direct and indirect benefits of hreflang
• Breakdown the hreflang syntax, guidelines, and methods of implementation
• Debunk common misunderstandings of hreflang

In my thirty years in Search Marketing, hreflang has been the only SEO feature that Google has released that SEOs are actively trying to get rid of. They want to eliminate it due to the incorrect or challenging implementations they encounter.

Error reduction is another goal of this and our other courses. Currently, 65% to 85% of websites still make the same mistakes when deploying them. I have been asking websites that have these mistakes why, and in nearly every case, they indicate they either hired someone to help them implement it, or they did not realize it was wrong. Interestingly, in a third of the cases, I was told they were only “fixing what is part of their remit,” meaning they are responsible for Europe only or English sites, so they only apply hreflang elements for those sites.