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My site is handwritten to be lightweight in amp. It has two language alternatives, en and tr.

barakudabodrum.com/tr/ is in Turkish and should be targeting users in Turkey.

barakudabodrum.com is in English and should be targeting the rest of the world.

I am using rel="alternate" tags inside each webpage and not in sitemap.

My questions are not about SEO. At this moment I just want to setup correctly.

Should I create two properties for each language inside search console? Should I have two sitemaps and two sitemap indexes? Should I also mention about them inside robots.txt?

I found information pieces everywhere but not a complete guidance on different ways of international targeting.

Thanks

Mete Tuneri
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1 Answers1

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You mention that your question "is not about SEO", however, most of what you have asked does not make sense outside the context of SEO. The entire point of setting up something like an hreflang tag is to avoid algorithmic penalties for duplicate content and to optimize your organic traffic in terms of international SEO.

If you are not concerned about SEO, you don't have to worry about any of the questions you mentioned. If on the other hand, your questions are entirely about SEO, then here is what you should keep in mind.

From a Google Search Console point of view, you'll likely want to keep everything under a single account, as you have opted to use a single domain. If, on the other hand, you had opted for two ccTLDs, then you'd want to break things out under two separate Search Console accounts.

Looking at the way you have set up your hreflang tags, there seem to be some issues.

Take for example the tags from the following page:

http://barakudabodrum.com/en/diving

<link hreflang="x-default" href="http://barakudabodrum.com/dalis" rel="alternate">
<link hreflang="tr" href="http://barakudabodrum.com/tr/dalis" rel="alternate">
<link hreflang="en" href="http://barakudabodrum.com/en/diving" rel="alternate">

In the first tag, you have the hreflang set to "x-default", which is not a language code. At the end of this tag you have listed rel="alternate", an hreflang tag can have a rel attribute of either x-default or alternate, it cannot be both.

The best practices, for maximizing international SEO state that you should ideally have a sitemap for every language you target, as well as one for each country. Which leads me to a follow-up question, which is why you are not using country codes inside your hreflang tags.

If you where targeting only people in Turkey, who spoke either English or Turkish, you would use:

  <link hreflang="tr-tr" href="http://barakudabodrum.com/tr/dalis" rel="x-default">
  <link hreflang="en-tr" href="http://barakudabodrum.com/en/diving" rel="alternate">

If alternatively, you were targeting only English speakers from the United States and Turkish speakers from Turkey, then it would be:

<link hreflang="tr-tr" href="http://barakudabodrum.com/tr/dalis" rel="x-default">
<link hreflang="en-us" href="http://barakudabodrum.com/en/diving" rel="alternate">
HMLDude
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