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    4. Best way to indicate multiple Lang/Locales for a site in the sitemap

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    Best way to indicate multiple Lang/Locales for a site in the sitemap

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    • DRSearchEngOpt
      DRSearchEngOpt last edited by

      So here is a question that may be obvious but wondering if there is some nuance here that I may be missing.

      Question:  Consider an ecommerce site that has multiple sites around the world but are all variations of the same thing just in different languages.  Now lets say some of these exist on just a normal .com page while others exist on different ccTLD's.  When you build out the XML Sitemap for these sites, especially the ones on the other ccTLD's, we want to ensure that using

      <loc>http://www.example.co.uk/en_GB/"</loc>

      <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
      hreflang="en-AU"
      href="http://www.example.com.AU/en_AU/"
      />
      <xhtml:link<br>rel="alternate"
      hreflang="en-NZ"
      href="http://www.example.co.NZ/en_NZ/"
      />

      Would be the correct way of doing this.  I know I have to change this for each different ccTLD but it just looks weird when you start putting about 10-15 different language locale variations as alternate links.  I guess I am just looking for a bit of re-affirmation I am doing this right.</xhtml:link<br></xhtml:link<br>

      Thanks!

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • DRSearchEngOpt
        DRSearchEngOpt last edited by

        Yes, you are doing the right thing.  You may also want to look at including Meta Tags in the as well. ()

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • gfiorelli1
          gfiorelli1 last edited by

          Maybe the best solution is using a tool like this one by MediaFlow: http://www.themediaflow.com/resources/tools/href-lang-tool/.

          You feed the tool with an .csv file and it returns you with a sitemaps.xml with all the hreflang annotations included.

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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