If Hreflang were to go away, what should a multinational business do?

We had a podcast listener ask us if we thought Google had stopped supporting hreflang as the hreflang implemented during a recent re-platforming was not yet working, and his Dev team was only willing to support it if it worked. He further asked what he should do to get Google not to consider his same-language local sites duplicates. This was one of the prompts for Bill Hunt’s recent article on why a correct hreflang might not be working.

What does hreflang do?

Understanding the purpose of hreflang goes a long way toward realizing the negative impact of not being able to leverage it for your multinational websites. Hreflang does the following:

It allows site owners to designate a language and country for a web page and any alternate versions of their languages and countries.
These hreflang settings effectively indicate a unique purpose for these pages, targeting a specific language and market, which helps prevent them from being classified as duplicates.

Hreflang is critical for same-language alternate pages so that Google can understand where they are targeting. Suppose Hreflang were to disappear and businesses lost this valuable designation. What other signals could be used to ensure Google understands these pages are not duplicates but serve a specific purpose?

A few months ago, Gary Illyes of Google’s Search team asked for recommendations for alternative methods for Google to replace hreflang. This came about when several International SEOs begged Google to stop supporting it because it seemed impossible to get it right. Bill Scully and I suggested various methods that Google could use as hreflang alternatives.

This is not a rehash of that article but a set of recommended actions for site owners to help remove the ambiguity of their content. The first set is Because you Should Actions, which encompasses a set of actions you should be doing already, which are fundamental geolocation signals. The second is Hail Mary’s, which are a bit more complex and require much more planning and resources. The last group represents some more Extreme Measures when all the other geolocation efforts do not work, and the local content is not getting indexed.

Because You Should Actions

This category reflects actions many companies should have implemented but often have not for many reasons, so Google may need help understanding the site’s geotarget. Taking more of these actions helps increase local market signals that may make the perceived duplicate site more unique to the local market.

HTML Lang Tag

Companies have asked me at least 100 times why search engines cannot use this required tag to understand the language and country of the website. The engines have all indicated they don’t use it as a signal due to the frequency of incorrect codes. It is often inaccurate due to content management systems (CMS) hardwiring it without any ability to change it. The language setting frequently depends on which country you downloaded or activated the CMS. It is also challenged by the requirement of localization systems to have a country and a language folder, which may not be possible with regional sites.

Validate Correct Lang Tag: Ensure you have a correct HTML Lang attribute on each page. This is a required element per W3C. <html lang=”en-US”>
Integrate into Deployment Checklist: Ensure this is integrated into any update or deployment checklist, especially when moving to a new platform or launching new markets, to ensure it is correct.

Note: Even if you fix this, it will not be a replacement for hreflang. Google has repeatedly stated that it does not use it to identify the language or region targeting the webpage due to its propensity for error. Google confirmed this during the English SEO office hours around 44:23 mark.

Localized Content and Keywords

Language and Cultural Nuance: Develop content designed to each target market’s language, culture, and search behaviors. This approach involves more than translation—it requires localizing content to resonate with regional preferences and include location-specific terminology. This is especially important for those duplicate same-language markets. If you have multiple English-language sites, you will need to add more local-specific content to the pages. Many sites don’t reference the market in any key SEO signals.
Keyword Research in Local Languages: Conduct in-depth keyword research and searcher intent specific to each market to identify high-value local search terms used in the local market. In each market, running shoes may be running shoes, but they also use trainers or some other variation in a specific market. This ensures that content aligns closely with what local users are searching for.

Cross-Site Links – Clear, Crawlable and User-Friendly Navigation

Cross-site links between international website versions are crucial in helping search engines move between markets quickly. This allows them to understand there are different versions and can share link equity when linked from a dominant market site. These internal links can help engines understand your global web infrastructure, aiding their interpretation of each market’s geolocation and language targeting. By strategically maintaining these links, businesses can avoid issues with geo-targeting misalignment and unhappy global visitors.

Provide Regional Language Switching Options: Ensure that users can easily switch to the appropriate country or language version through a prominent selector on the page. This helps users who may have landed on the wrong version find the relevant content and signals search engines about the available regional content. Many websites have removed or hidden their language and market switchers, making it impossible for search engines to find distinct, localized versions of the website, improving the chances of the correct version appearing in regional search results.
Make Country and Language Selectors Crawlable: Too many websites use a search function via scripting to allow users to search for the desired country or language, making it impossible to crawl. Convert these into a static page listing language, country, and currency options.
Review and Update Language and Country Selectors: When setting up Hreflang Builder projects, we often scrape the country/language selector page to capture the information, and 95% of the time, many of the links are gone or have one or more redirects. This is a critical navigation and user experience page so give it some care and feeding on a frequent basis.

Local Backlinks and Online Mentions

A key advantage a local website will have is links from local sites, including trade organizations, bloggers, and partners. Simply because they are local, they will naturally gain links. For multinationals, this becomes more of a challenge, making it critical to increase authority in local markets by getting links from websites in regional markets and leveraging in-market PR initiatives.

Regional Backlink Building: Building high-quality backlinks from authoritative sites within each target country can strengthen the relevance of the local pages. This means engaging with each market’s local influencers, blogs, and business directories to establish the site as a credible, region-specific resource.
Localized PR Campaigns: Running PR campaigns targeting local media outlets and websites can increase online mentions and links from sites in each region, reinforcing the content’s location relevance.
Updating Links to Global and Non-Local Sites – an often overlooked activity is to review links to the global home page from reputable trade organizations and product announcements.

Structured Data for Language and Location

A few schema signals could be helpful with location designations, especially with e-commerce queries. The “priceCurrency” element lists the abbreviation of the local currency, indicating the actual currency, like AUD, USD, or CAD. This removes any confusion about what market this product page is targeting. That said, this does not help much in the many Euro currency markets.

Organization Schema: Use Organizational schema markup that emphasizes the location of the business via the properties in the Organization or LocalBusiness schema, validating the local address if you have an actual local presence.
Product Offer – “priceCurrency”: Adding the pricecurrency element to your product pages via product structured data is critical to ensure Google can understand they are local especially with unique currency markets.
inLanguage Schema: Google does not indicate they support the inlanguage element; it could be used in the future by other search engines, especially AI systems.

Credit to Ziggy Shtrosberg for the original suggestion of using the Schema elements “inLanguage” and/or “area served” attributes to designate the internationalization signal. You can evaluate which is more appropriate to your content as the availablelanguage schema as it is related to a product or service vs. the inlanguage element that applies to the language of an event or a specific performance.

Hail Mary’s

While Hail Mary might be too dramatic a phrase, the actions in this section require a bit more resources, including planning, budgeting, and development resources. If you get it right, it will go a long way toward establishing a geotarget for the content.

Server Location and Speed Optimization

Local Hosting or CDN Usage: Hosting content on local servers or using a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can reduce page load times in each market, which could enhance both user experience and SEO performance. Some SEOs argue that hosting in or near a target country may have minor benefits in signaling regional relevance to search engines.

Domain and URL Structure Optimization

Country-Specific Domains: If using gTLDs, you may want to move to ccTLDs (country code top-level domains, e.g., .fr for France or .de for Germany) wherever possible. While not as strong a signal as they once were, these domains naturally signal to search engines the geographic focus of the content.

Subdomains or Subdirectories for Global Sites: If a business uses a single global domain, organizing content by subdomain (fr.example.com) or subdirectory (example.com/fr/) can help indicate language and location targeting. Subdomains have typically been the least favored approach.

Consistent and localized URLs: Consistent or localized URLs allow search engines to associate specific regions with certain pages.

Mobile-Focused Optimization for Local Relevance

Leverage Location-Based Mobile SEO: With the increase in mobile search volume, optimizing for location-specific mobile searches can improve local search visibility. Using location-based terms, Google Business Profile for local businesses, and structured data emphasizing local relevance (like localBusiness schema) can help search engines understand where to prioritize the content.
Google My Business Listings: Ensure your Google My Business (GMB) listings are accurate and localized for each target country, including the business name, address, phone number, language, currency, and opening hours. Add relevant photos and descriptions personalized to the local audience. Encourage reviews from local market customers to build trust and credibility.

International Google Product Feeds-Friendly Navigation

Provide Regional Language Switching Options: Ensure that users can easily switch to the appropriate country or language version through a prominent selector on the page. This helps users who may have landed on the wrong version find the relevant content and signals search engines about the available regional content.

Market-Specific Product Feeds: Google’s International Product Feeds allow you to create a product feed designed to each target market, including translated product titles, descriptions, attributes, local currency, measurements, and shipping details.
Global Trade Item Numbers: Global Trade Item Numbers (GTIN) designate your products globally. One of the recommendations we made as a hreflang replacement was for Google to leverage GTINs as a primary key and map products across all market-specific feeds as a way to understand target markets at a product level.

As Google displays more product shopping blocks for commercial and transactional queries worldwide, creating market-specific feeds will become a critical activity, increasing the relevance and visibility of your products to searchers, especially if your local page does not show in the SERPs.

Extreme Options

For many websites, following all or most of the previous recommendations should make the website appear more locally focused, giving search engines sufficient clues to indicate that it has a specific market purpose rather than simply being a clone. In some cases, those who cannot or will not make those adjustments especially when keeping a gTLD setup may need to implement one or more extreme methods.

IP Location Detection: While this will not help get the local pages indexed, it will at least redirect users to the markets you designate for their online location. If you go this route and are confident Google may not index these local sites, you may want to remove the country name from your title tags so local searchers may be more willing to click on the SERP listing.

Website Consolidations: Reduce the number of same-language websites that need to be indexed. Focus first on any underperforming sites, clones without location-specific information, or simply because you paid for the localization. Ensure you follow best practices for site consolidations to ensure any equity is transferred accordingly.

Language-Only Sites: Several enterprise companies, like IBM, have moved to language-only websites, which use IP location detection and a set of rules to insert local elements like lead-generation forms or currency selectors into the pages. They have done this for efficiency and to leverage modern technology, creating hybrid global and local representations.

Accept It and Move On: It may be easier to accept that your redundant content does not have enough unique value to be indexed and presented to a specific market. Most companies may not want to accept this option, but you may only have a choice with major changes or one of these other extreme options.

Conclusion

Adapting to a post-hreflang world would require multinational businesses to embrace a combination of foundational practices, including a stronger emphasis on market-specific localization, user engagement, and geo-targeting strategies. The key is to ensure that each market’s website version independently conveys strong local relevance to search engines and users alike.

Ultimately, while the absence of hreflang would require more effort, the focus should always remain on delivering highly relevant, localized experiences to users and clear, actionable signals to search engines. Adaptability, creativity, and a commitment to localization are the cornerstones of thriving in such an environment.