How to implement hreflang on multilingual ecommerce large sites?
We are trying to implement hreflang on multilingual ecommerce site which has 800K + URLs . We have below questions
- Is hreflang implementation a manual process: Example: Developers/SEO team will identify products that are available on all the stores and update the hreflang store links.?
- Is there a tool that can help develop hreflang based on available products? (We are not using any CMS Platform)
- How the technical implementation works for larger sites with any URLs in it.
If your website doesn't use a content management system (CMS) and you need to implement hreflang tags on a large e-commerce site without automated tools, here's a manual approach to make the process more efficient:
Create a Spreadsheet: Begin by creating a spreadsheet that lists all of your website's pages along with their corresponding language and region. Use columns for URL, language code, and region code.
Generate Hreflang Tags: In the spreadsheet, use formulas or text concatenation to generate the hreflang tags for each page. For example, if your URLs are in column A, language codes in column B, and region codes in column C, you can use a formula like =CONCATENATE("") in an adjacent column to create the hreflang tag.
Copy-Paste to HTML: Once you have generated hreflang tags for all pages in your spreadsheet, copy the generated tags and paste them into the section of each HTML page. If you have a consistent template for your pages, you might be able to add the tags to the template to ensure they appear on all pages.
XML Sitemap with Hreflang Tags: Additionally, for a large site, you can create separate XML sitemaps for each language or region, and include the hreflang tags within the sitemaps. There are various tools and scripts available that can help you automate the generation of these sitemaps based on your spreadsheet data.
Regular Audits and Checks: Perform regular audits and checks to ensure that the hreflang tags are correctly implemented and that there are no issues or errors. You can use SEO auditing tools or Google Search Console for this purpose.
While manually adding hreflang tags to each page can be time-consuming, using a spreadsheet to generate the tags based on a structured plan can help streamline the process. However, it's crucial to be diligent and accurate in this manual approach, especially on a large e-commerce site, to avoid errors and maintain proper SEO performance.
