1) The document summarizes Patrick Stox's presentation on international SEO and technical aspects of implementing hreflang. 2) It addresses common misconceptions about hreflang and what can cause issues like underscores instead of dashes in codes. 3) It provides troubleshooting tips for hreflang such as checking Google Search Console for canonicalization and international targeting reports.

1. @patrickstox #pubcon
International SEO: The
Weird Technical Parts
Presented by: Patrick Stox

2. @patrickstox #pubcon
• Technical SEO for IBM - Opinions expressed are
my own and not those of IBM.
• I write, mainly for Search Engine Land
• I speak at some conferences like this one, SMX,
TechSEO Boost
• Organizer for the Raleigh SEO Meetup (most successful
in US)
• We also run a conference, the Raleigh SEO Conference
• Also the Beer & SEO Meetup (because beer)
• 2017 + 2018 + 2019 US Search Awards Judge, 2017 +
2018 + 2019 UK Search Awards Judge, 2018 + 2019
Interactive Marketing Awards Judge
• Founder Technical SEO Slack Group
• Moderator /r/TechSEO on Reddit
Who is Patrick Stox?

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First Off, Listen to Aleyda!
Those were best practices

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Hreflang
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/965507331369984002

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• They work in pairs to form a cluster of pages
• They get to share signals like links from the strongest
page in the cluster which helps other versions rank
better when correct.
More About Hreflang

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This Is What Happens When They Break
• Multiple pages show
• Wrong versions show
• Titles may not match pages

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Common Misconception #1
People say Yandex doesn’t support hreflang in
sitemaps
They do!
https://yandex.ru/support/webmaster/controlling-
robot/sitemap-local.html#sitemap-local

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Common Misconception #2
Sitemaps are better because hreflang is processed
faster.
The reality is signals are checked at time of crawl
whether sitemap or html.

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Common Misconception #3
Hreflang is based on your canonical tag.
It doesn’t matter what your canonical is set as, it
matters what the indexed version is. (more on why
that is important later)

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Here’s What You Can Get Away With
AKA Google is going to ignore of fix these things for you

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Looks like Google lets it slide, although standards and best
practices say to use “–” instead of “_”
https://twitter.com/dsottimano/status/867315538057474049
Hreflang – Underscore Instead of Dash

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https://www.reddit.com/r/TechSEO/comments/87pxsu/i_am_john_
mueller_webmaster_trends_analyst_at/
Hreflang – en-UK instead of en-GB

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Is it essential to have self-referencing hreflang tags?
John Mueller: No.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjbaDP-P7PA&t=24m39s
Hreflang – Self Referencing

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https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/702080129804189696
Hreflang – Relative vs Absolute URLs

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Hreflang to a URL that Redirects
Mostly true, but X-default can be used for auto-
redirecting, serving dynamic content, or as a language
selector page.

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More about X-default
The way this works is by most specific match, so based on
signals what is the best matching page:
• lc-cc = language in the specified country
• lc = doesn't match a country but matches the language
settings of the user searching
• x-default = overall default if it doesn't match any
language+country or language or if it can't be determined.
This is like a catch all for anything that doesn't match
anything else.

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What Will Break Things

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Putting Everything On One Page
Googlebot crawls from the US, putting all versions of
content on one page just means they only see one
version.

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Also Be Careful with Auto-Redirecting
People usually use some combination of cookies, IP,
and browser language.

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Redirect all users based on location
• Pros: Users mostly end up on the right version
• Cons: cost, complexity, maintenance, accuracy, crawl/index issues, titles
and descriptions in the wrong language
• Would redirect search engines to where they crawl from. Google for instance
mostly crawls from the US so we would effectively de-index all geo pages. For
other search engines and occasionally from Google (they sometimes crawl
from outside the US) we may remove the US pages from the index.
• Potential legal issues with EU Anti-Geoblocking Regulations which tell you not
to automatically redirect users to a different country, to give them an option
https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/faq/geo-blocking.

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Redirect Users but not Search Engines
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66355?hl=en
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en

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Give the user a choice
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

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Be Careful With These Banners
https://twitter.com/JohnMu/status/821328556181622784

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Check Your Stack
Encoding characters in URLs with UTF-8 is fine with
Google, but there may be a point of failure in your
tech stack where it is not supported.

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Page Serves From A Different URL Than
How It’s Indexed
You need the indexed version in your tags.
Canonicalization can be complex: Canonical tag,
redirects, internal linking, sitemap URLs, hreflang???,
etc.

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<head> Break
https://ohgm.co.uk/breaking-head-quietly/
You can’t have hreflang tags in the body because they
could be used for hijacking. The tags can be forced
into the body section under certain conditions.
Can be caused by things like iframes or <p> tags in the
<head> section, can be from injecting them. Use DOM
breakpoints to troubleshoot.

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What Happens with Different Setups?

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Domains
Domain names can expire.
Domains can become invalidated in GSC (impacts
sitemap implementation of hreflang)
Difficult to maintain.

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Subdomain
Can become invalidated in GSC (impacts sitemap
implementation of hreflang)
SEOs don’t like them and may try to change things.
Change is when things go wrong.

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Same page in multiple countries, what happens?
Google views as duplicates and folds together in their index
(they’re trying to help us by consolidating the duplicates).
Wrong versions of the pages show in the locales, whichever
page became the main version when folded shows instead.
Any – Duplicates

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Eventually Google will make the connections via hreflang
tags and pages will be swapped properly based on locale and
the correct one will show
Any – Duplicates

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https://searchengineland.com/google-changed-the-way-it-works-and-
no-one-really-noticed-300213
Any – Duplicates

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Mostly language based with dynamic personalization or
options for different countries.
Fewer, stronger pages.
What I Prefer

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How to Troubleshoot

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GSC Shows Data on Canonical
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2019/02/consolid
ating-your-website-traffic-on.html

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Checking GSC URL inspector to see how
pages are indexed

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GSC International Targeting Report

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The right way to check which page is
ranking in a country
1. Go to the version of Google for the country and
perform your search.
2. At the end of the search url add &hl=lc&gl=cc where
lc is the language code and cc is the country code.

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Proactive Monitoring
Regression tests, crawlers, proactive crawlers
Any number of things can break from masking to things
carrying over from dev/test/staging environments, CMS
issues, etc.

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@patrickstox