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.
What Happens If a Hreflang Sitemap Doesn't Include Every Language for Missing Translated Pages?
-
As we are building a hreflang sitemap for a client, we are correctly implementing the tag across 5 different languages including English. However, the News and Events section was never translated into any of the other four languages. There are also a few pages that were translated into some but not all of the 4 languages. Is it good practice to still list out the individual non-translated pages like on a regular sitemap without a hreflang tag? Should the hreflang sitemap include the hreflang tag with pages that are missing a few language translations (when one or two language translations may be missing)?
We are uncertain if this inconsistency would create a problem and we would like some feedback before pushing the hreflang sitemap live.
-
Hi Kyle,
I would probably only include the URLs that have been translated in the hreflang sitemap, unless the English content that hasn't been translated can be assigned to one territory / language, e.g. en_us or en_gb, etc.
If the pages that haven't been translated are otherwise linked-to throughout the site and are present in a regular sitemap, they will be found. I am not 100% sure that leaving them out of the hreflang sitemap is the way to go, so I will leave this question open for other people to reply as well. However, I'd say that if you wanted English language content to serve internationally because it has not been translated, it would be a mistake to target it to one English-language speaking area via hreflang.
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
-
Would You Redirect a Page if the Parent Page was Redirected?
Hi everyone! Let's use this as an example URL: https://www.example.com/marvel/avengers/hulk/ We have done a 301 redirect for the "Avengers" page to another page on the site. Sibling pages of the "Hulk" page live off "marvel" now (ex: /marvel/thor/ and /marvel/iron-man/). Is there any benefit in doing a 301 for the "Hulk" page to live at /marvel/hulk/ like it's sibling pages? Is there any harm long-term in leaving the "Hulk" page under a permanently redirected page? Thank you! Matt
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | amag0 -
Hreflang : mixing with/without country code for same language
Hello, I would like to display 3 different english versions of my website : 1 for UK, 1 for CA and 1 for other english users. It would look like this for a page: . (english content with £ prices) <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en-ca" hreflang="en-CA">(english content with $CA prices)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> <link rel="alternate" href="https: xxx.com="" en="" " hreflang="en">(english content without currency)</link rel="alternate" href="https:> I wonder if I can mix this hreflang without country code with hreflangs with country code for the 2 other specific versions... or if the hreflang without country code version will appear whatever the country, even if i specified it . In other terms, is hreflang="en" > hreflang="en-CA" + hreflang="en-GB" if tagged together on a same page? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlexisH0 -
Do I need to add the actual language for meta tags and description for different languages? cited for duplicate content for different language
Hi, I am fairly new to SEO and this community so pardon my questions. We recently launched on our drupal site mandarin language version for the entire site. And when i do the crawl site, i get duplicate content for the pages that are in mandarin. Is this a problem or can i ignore this? Should i make different page titles for the different languages? Also, for the metatag and descriptions, would it better in the native language for google to search for? thanks in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lynetteboss0 -
Magento: Should we disable old URL's or delete the page altogether
Our developer tells us that we have a lot of 404 pages that are being included in our sitemap and the reason for this is because we have put 301 redirects on the old pages to new pages. We're using Magento and our current process is to simply disable, which then makes it a a 404. We then redirect this page using a 301 redirect to a new relevant page. The reason for redirecting these pages is because the old pages are still being indexed in Google. I understand 404 pages will eventually drop out of Google's index, but was wondering if we were somehow preventing them dropping out of the index by redirecting the URL's, causing the 404 pages to be added to the sitemap. My questions are: 1. Could we simply delete the entire unwanted page, so that it returns a 404 and drops out of Google's index altogether? 2. Because the 404 pages are in the sitemap, does this mean they will continue to be indexed by Google?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | andyheath0 -
Creating 100,000's of pages, good or bad idea
Hi Folks, Over the last 10 months we have focused on quality pages but have been frustrated with competition websites out ranking us because they have bigger sites. Should we focus on the long tail again? One option for us is to take every town across the UK and create pages using our activities. e.g. Stirling
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PottyScotty
Stirling paintball
Stirling Go Karting
Stirling Clay shooting We are not going to link to these pages directly from our main menus but from the site map. These pages would then show activities that were in a 50 mile radius of the towns. At the moment we have have focused our efforts on Regions, e.g. Paintball Scotland, Paintball Yorkshire focusing all the internal link juice to these regional pages, but we don't rank high for towns that the activity sites are close to. With 45,000 towns and 250 activities we could create over a million pages which seems very excessive! Would creating 500,000 of these types of pages damage our site? This is my main worry, or would it make our site rank even higher for the tougher keywords and also get lots of traffic from the long tail like we used to get. Is there a limit to how big a site should be? edit0 -
Include Cross Domain Canonical URL's in Sitemap - Yes or No?
I have several sites that have cross domain canonical tags setup on similar pages. I am unsure if these pages that are canonicalized to a different domain should be included in the sitemap. My first thought is no, because I should only include pages in the sitemap that I want indexed. On the other hand, if I include ALL pages on my site in the sitemap, once Google gets to a page that has a cross domain canonical tag, I'm assuming it will just note that and determine if the canonicalized page is the better version. I have yet to see any errors in GWT about this. I have seen errors where I included a 301 redirect in my sitemap file. I suspect its ok, but to me, it seems that Google would rather not find these URL's in a sitemap, have to crawl them time and time again to determine if they are the best page, even though I'm indicating that this page has a similar page that I'd rather have indexed.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WEB-IRS0 -
There's a website I'm working with that has a .php extension. All the pages do. What's the best practice to remove the .php extension across all pages?
Client wishes to drop the .php extension on all their pages (they've got around 2k pages). I assured them that wasn't necessary. However, in the event that I do end up doing this what's the best practices way (and easiest way) to do this? This is also a WordPress site. Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | digisavvy0 -
Best practice to redirects based on visitors' detected language
One of our websites has two languages, English and Italian. The English pages are available at the root level:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Damiano
www.site.com/ English homepage www.site.com/page1
www.site.com/page2 The Italian pages are available under the /it/ level:
www.site.com/it Italian homepage www.site.com/it/pagina1
www.site.com/it/pagina2 When an Italian visitor first visits www.mysit.com we'd like to redirect it to www.site.com/it but we don't know if that would impact search engine spiders (eg GoogleBot) in any way... It would be better to do a Javascript redirect? Or an http 3xx redirect? If so, which of the 3xx redirect should we use? Thank you0