Geography and language signals

When a large share of clicks comes from countries that do not match your primary declared language—or hreflang coverage looks thin—you may be serving the wrong locale variant or missing translations.

What we look for

On plans that store geographic breakdowns, we compare country click share with html lang, visible language cues, and hreflang annotations from the crawl. Exact formulas are heuristic and may evolve.

What to do

Audit translations, hreflang clusters, and regional landing pages. Ensure each locale has indexable content that matches audience language.

Hreflang cluster

When a page already lists hreflang alternates, we check two things. The page should include a link to itself. Each alternate we have crawled should link back. A trailing slash counts as the same URL. Pages with no hreflang are left alone, and so are alternates we have not crawled.

On the English tote page, the Danish alternate must point back. This version does not:

<!-- https://example.com/products/leather-tote -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="da" href="https://example.com/da/products/leather-tote" />

<!-- https://example.com/da/products/leather-tote, before -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="da" href="https://example.com/da/products/leather-tote" />

<!-- After: the Danish page links back, and the English page includes itself -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/products/leather-tote" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="da" href="https://example.com/da/products/leather-tote" />

Example

When you serve multiple languages, tie pages together with hreflang and keep lang on each document accurate:

<!-- English page -->

<html lang="en-US">
<head>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://example.com/products/tote" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="da-DK" href="https://example.com/da/products/tote" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/products/tote" />
</head>

Technical details

Requires sufficient GSC geo facts; sparse data may suppress the signal. See Search Console data in SEO Perception.