How the HREF Lang tags works for your Magento store

When you have a international SEO strategy on your multi-language store in Magento implementing the hreflang tag is a good way to get the content right for the certain countries and regions to specify the right country for the specific content and prevent duplicate content.

Using the HREF Lang Tags in your Magento® Store

The href lang tag is introduced by Google in December 2011 and is designed to serve the correct language or regional URL in the Google Search results. For example, we take the dutch store-view, there is a big chance you can use the content for a Belgium store as well so you implement the same content on your .be domain but off course, you want to clarify this double content and that’s where you can use the href lang tag. In this way you can tell to Google what content is specified for the right county.

Another language example could be the UK and the USA, both are English and there is a big chance that you just duplicate the content but also in this matter it’s a good idea to tell Google where the right content is located for the specific country so Google can display this in their Search Engine Results without having a duplicate content problem or send the customer to the wrong page. The Hreflang tag is a signal for Google and not a directive.

In this way, the Href Lang Tags will look like;

another example;

or;

Check if your Href lang tags are working

You can use the http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/ tool to see if the href lang tags are implemented in the right way on your Magento store. The tool checks the source of your Magento® product or Magento® CMS page to see if there are any alternative tags in the source and if so, what they tell. For example, we’ve checked our Rich Snippet Suite extension for Magento®, as you can see it sees the alternate URL and the specific language for that page, in this way we prevent the duplicate content and tell Google what to do.

Implement the Href lang in your Magento® Store

When you have a multi-domain/ multi-language Magento® store and you want to use the HREF lang tags to specify the right languages for Google you can implement the code manually in the sources or you can use our Multi-Language Alternate href lang tag extension. These extensions allow you to set the right language or region codes to all your product automatically, you can group the CMS pages to tell Google which CMS page is equal on the certain Languages.

The Magento® HREF Language Tag Extension is available here