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In a recent episode of Google’s “Search Off The Record” podcast, Gary Illyes, a member of Google’s Search Relations team, discussed concerns regarding the incorrect implementation of hreflang and its potential impact on SEO.
During the discussion, Illyes was asked about the consequences of mismatched hreflang annotations and the actual page content.
He specifically addressed scenarios where a page might be incorrectly labeled as one language while containing content in another.
Illyes stated:
“As far as I remember, I worked on the parsing implementation plus the promotion implementation of hreflang, and back then, it didn’t cause problems.”
However, he also noted that his direct experience with this was from around 2016, adding:
“That’s a few years back… since then, we changed so many things that I would have to check whether it causes problems.”
Providing further context, Illyes explained Google’s approach to language and country relevance:
“When I spelled out LDCP, I meant language demotion, country promotion. For example, if someone is searching in German and your page is in English, it would receive a negative demotion in the search results.”
This indicates that while incorrect hreflang implementation might not directly cause problems, the actual language of the content remains crucial for search relevance.
Interestingly, Illyes pointed out that there are exceptions to strict language matching:
“It’s less relevant to the query unless you are searching for something specific like ‘how do you spell banana’… In that case, it does matter because you’re searching in English, so we would assume you want a page that explains how to spell banana in English, not in German.”
Understanding how Google handles hreflang and language mismatches can help shape effective international SEO strategies.
While Google’s systems may be somewhat forgiving of hreflang errors, the actual language of the content remains a crucial factor in search relevance.
Here are the key takeaways:
As Illyes noted, Google’s systems have evolved over time. It’s essential to monitor official Google documentation and announcements for the most up-to-date best practices in international SEO.
Original news from SearchEngineJournal
