International SEO — Whiteboard Friday

International SEO — Whiteboard Friday

Blog Article

And finally, hreflang. It's probably the method we're all familiar with and all dread when we hear. From an SEO perspective, it's quite simple, right? It's just an HTML tag. We're just telling Google, "Hey, look at my URL. That's the country I want." But from a development perspective, it can become a real challenge depending on the complexity of your websites.

Now a lot of the time hreflang implementations are really difficult to validate from an SEO perspective. But also it's really difficult to implement for developers because let's take, for example, you have a website that targets 5 different countries and has 100 pages per country. What the developers will need to do is validate each URL and the implementation. And to do the validation, how we can think about it, from an SEO perspective, is running a crawl. We all know how long it can take to run an intensive crawl of a large site. It can take hours and be really draining on our laptops. Now imagine trying to do this every single time a user refreshes a web page. Depending on how the hreflang is implemented, that's sometimes required for the developers, which is why we end up with having non-200 status URLs or non-indexable URLs in our hreflang mapping, essentially making it invalid.