GWMT - Your site has no hreflang tags

[AussieDave]

I have a warning in GWMT >> Search Traffic >> International Targeting

Your site has no hreflang tags.
Google uses hreflang tags to match the user's language preference to the right variation of your pages.

No sh#t sherlock!

Under the Country Tab same section:
Your site's domain (.au) is currently associated with the target: Australia

Because it is a .au Google automatically lists it as targeting: Australia. That can not be manually changed.

I don't target an international market, as Google is well aware of. Yet it's giving a stupid warning.

 

[Giggity.]

That is strange you got a warning, you would think that with a .au TLD and setting the geo target this would not be required

 

[JackpotGenius]

hey guys...I'm new to the forum, but anyway I got these errors when setting up a new site and resolved them by adding the following tags to my default head:

    <link rel="alternate" href="#yourdomain" hreflang="en-gb" />
    <link rel="alternate" href="#yourdomain" hreflang="en-ca" />
    <link rel="alternate" href="#yourdomain" hreflang="en-au" />

that was for English UK, Canada and Australia of course...if you have multi-language you will want a different tag for when the language is switched to identify it as such to google...anyway it should solve your warning issue for you

 

[AussieDave]

That is strange you got a warning, you would think that with a .au TLD and setting the geo target this would not be required

Yep that's what I thought too. Very strange indeed.

    <link rel="alternate" href="#yourdomain" hreflang="en-gb" />
    <link rel="alternate" href="#yourdomain" hreflang="en-ca" />
    <link rel="alternate" href="#yourdomain" hreflang="en-au" />

These would normally point to EG - yourdomain.com/ca/ or ca.yourdomain.com etc
Albeit it may fix the current problem BUT could very well create another one, one which is heaps worse - dup content springs to mind.

 

[JackpotGenius]

perhaps you are right, I guess in that case choose one lang tag? seems strange that you cant target multiple english speaking regions without getting flagged for duplicate content...its like we need to rewrite all content and throw a few slang words from the region we want to target!

 

[3joker]

Strange indeed, the .au TLD should be enough. Never had this problem with .se sites, maybe Google is changing something.

 

[AussieDave]

maybe Google is changing something.

If they are, I wish they'd 1'st work on their alog to kick hackers, BH and scraper sites back to the stone age

 

[advent_geek]

Is it Enough to useWMT GEO-TARGET for Single Language Website