New markup for international search campaigns

On Monday Google announced its support of a new mark-up for multilingual content. This tag can be used if you are serving up the same content in the same language to different international markets as well as for translated content. The tag should be really useful for sites which find that the wrong version of their site is out ranking the preferred market URLs. It is common that US sites with a strong back link profile outrank their international versions of the site in the international SERPs. When implemented on each URL of the site, this tag should help to combat this.

In the tag you can specify the language, in this instance German.

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de” href=”http://www.example.com/de/” />

or the language and the region, in this instance German in Switzerland.

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”de-CH” href=”http://www.example.com/de-ch/” />

Providing these signals to the search engines will enable them to have greater understanding of the intent of the content and serve the most appropriate URL in the search results. This will make the SERPs more relevant for users and increase traffic and conversion to many international search campaigns.

Summary

If your site targets people in more than one geographical location I would recommend this tag be implemented site wide.

For more information take a look at the original post on the Google Webmaster Central Blog

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