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Use Sitemaps for Sites With Many Hreflang Annotations

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If you have a large international site that has many hreflang annotations on each page, you might want to consider moving those annotations to a sitemap instead.

The question came up on Twitter about the use of multiple hreflang tags on the same URL, with an example of ten different EU countries on it for hreflang.  John Mueller from Google suggested that while there is no limit on the number of annotations per page, it might make more sense to use a sitemap for hreflang instead.

Google has lots of documentation on hreflang, including sitemaps specifically, although they don’t list a specific guidelines for at what point using a sitemap makes more sense.  But using sitemaps can make it easier to manage, especially as new languages and/or countries are added to the site.

An added bonus is that moving sites with many hreflang annotations per page means that it will reduce the page size and potentially reduce load speed as well, for those sites that are struggling to improve speed scores.

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Jennifer Slegg

Founder & Editor at The SEM Post
Jennifer Slegg is a longtime speaker and expert in search engine marketing, working in the industry for almost 20 years. When she isn't sitting at her desk writing and working, she can be found grabbing a latte at her local Starbucks or planning her next trip to Disneyland. She regularly speaks at Pubcon, SMX, State of Search, Brighton SEO and more, and has been presenting at conferences for over a decade.

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