Alternate Hreflang Tags

Many Magento stores translate content into different languages in order to cater to customers from different parts of the world. With the hreflang tag extension, which is commonly known as rel="alternate" hreflang="x", each page's language is made known to Google so that it will match users searching in that language to pages which are in the same language.

Hreflang enhances your SEO without you having to code it yourself.

In this way, the group with Href Lang Tags will look like;
<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”nl-nl” href=”http://www.yourmagentostore.nl” />
Tell's Google that this page is also available in dutch but for the country Netherlands

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”nl-be” href=”http://www.yourmagentostore.com/” />
Tell's Google that this page is also available in dutch but for the country Belgium

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr-be” href=”http://www.yourmagentostore.fr/” />
Tell's Google that this page is also available in french but for the country Belgium

What is Rel="Alternate" Hreflang="x"?

Introduced in 2011, the hreflang attribute indicates the page language and makes the relationship between content pages of different languages known to search engines such as Google. This is handy for Magento shops which have multiple storefronts in varying languages catered towards a variety of consumers while selling the same products. If different storefronts selling the same product are linked with the Hreflang attribute, search engines will know which page to direct the customer to. A product page with both a Spanish and an English version will be tagged as "Español" by using hreflang="es”.

A customer with an IP address from a Spanish country will be directed from the Google search result to the Spanish page version instead of the English one. By ensuring that your target consumers are directed to the most relevant page in their language, your bounce rate will decrease and your conversions will increase.

Using Hreflang tags extension for country and/or Region targeting

Instead of targeting consumers based on their language, we are also able to target consumers based on their country. For instance, a Belgium storefront using a Dutch language pack. Using two different stores, a Dutch storefront and a Belgium storefront, we are able to target different consumers with different product pages: a Dutch one (hreflang="nl-nl") and a Belgium one (hreflang="nl-be"). This is especially handy when it comes to geo-targeting consumers for changes in currency, shipping costs, seasonality, and culture.

Use Alternate Hreflang tags for CMS pages

Our hreflang extension and magento can recognize the different urls for the products and categories but for CMS pages it's made up from a different data structure. With the CMS pages it's now possible to categorize them to connect them using the href lang tags. For this we have implemented a category function into the CMS system where every CMS page with the same category tags will be will be identified as alternate pages.

For example, there can be three storeviews with three distinct "contact us" pages:

[storeview] magmodules.eu - identifier: contact-us
[storeview] magmodules.nl - identifier: neem-contactop
[storeview] magmodules.de - identifier: Kontakt

By giving each of the three CMS pages the category "contactus", the three pages will be link as related and the hreflang tag will be added automatically.