New meta tag by Google Webmaster for multinational websites

Today we are going to tell you about the latest update which will happen in the SEO world on 10th April, 2013, when Google webmaster has published there new meta tag for multilingual and also for multinational websites.

This meta tag is very important for the sites which are in more than one language and also having micro-sites or we can say that they have sub-domains from the same domain. this will invented because the homepages multinational and multilingual websites are sometimes configured to point visitors to localized pages by using wither thorough redirect  or by other methods like by changing the content to reflect the user’s language.

So here we go about the main point, Google Webmaster introduce a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that the webmaster can use to specify such homepages that is supported by both Google and Yandex.

For you folks we are giving you some example for the easy understanding about this tag what is it and why Google is using it. let's have a look on the given image below:

Google Webmaster example for the use of rel-alternate-hreflang annotation

 

• http://example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
• http://example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
• http://example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
• http://example.com/: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide.

In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using rel-alternate-hreflang using Sitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-us" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited. For example, it would be the page our algorithms try to show French-speaking searchers worldwide or English-speaking searchers on google.ca.

The same annotation applies for homepages that dynamically alter their contents based on a user’s perceived geolocation or the Accept-Language headers. The x-default hreflang value signals to our algorithms that such a page doesn’t target a specific language or locale.

And i think this also help you in the mutinational websites like for the work of Video Marketing, SEO Services, Graphic Design, Web Design etc.