Take for example a language code without a country code
There are also other ways that the user could end up in the wrong direction.
If you define the URL only for speakers of a dbtodata certain language, living in certain countries (for example, en-us), but do not indicate the URL for the user of that language who lives in a country for which you have not added the code (for example, an English speaker living in Italy), Google will proceed by trial and error.
Which means he could be wrong.
Or take the example of a generic tag with a language code but no country. This generic tag hreflang=”en”, for example, indicates the version of a page to send to the user who speaks English and lives in Italy.
There are other possible scenarios when it comes to implementing hreflang tags. This video from Google is many years old, but it has a great overview of what could be confusing. It's definitely worth checking out.
Want to reach out to anyone? Just use x-default
Using hreflang=”x-default” is basically a way of saying, “This URL is not intended for any language, it is open to all.” This is great if a page is intended for multiple languages or if it is a language selection page. It is much better than adding tags for an infinite amount of languages.Perhaps the most positive aspect of using hreflang is that it solves duplication problems quickly and easily. A site that is split across multiple domains, subdomains, or subfolders, and that targets multiple countries can be seen as a site with very or completely similar parts.
Consider that a brand could sell the same 100 products in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Australia, but have unique URLs for each country.
So that company has a problem: should they write unique product descriptions, blogs, how-tos, and category pages for each market to avoid any potential negative search performance effects from duplicate content? Or should they just implement hreflang tags and save themselves days of work?
