July 14, 2019

Google's International Targeting

  —International targeting for unilingual/multi-regional sites.

This blog is only written in Canadian english (en-ca). This is close enough to english (en) that I’d like it to turn up for anyone looking at english search results. Seems reasonable.

Google’s Search Console flags my site saying

Your site has no hreflang tags.

My country is unlisted because I don’t feel like my topics should be targeted at only Canadian users. Vain perhaps, but reasonable given the english-only content.

My site’s URL is bminard.github.io.

How to add hreflang support to my site to eliminate the problem identified in the Google Search Console.?

From Multi-regional and multilingual sites:

A multi-regional website is one that explicitly targets users in different countries.

My site seems to fit the definition of multi-regional, as I am targeting english speaking users in different countries.

From Use hreflang for language and regional URLs:

Using language annotations

Imagine you have an English language page hosted at http://www.example.com/ … …

• Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.

Expanding your site to more languages provided information that cleared up my confusion. The use of hreflang for unilingual and multi-regional sites started at the 0:6:34 mark: use a sitemap even if your site uses only one language.

An example using Jekyll to generate a sitemap containing hreflang. If you need a simpler example, checkout Use a sitemap to indicate alternate language pages.

I modified this example as follows.