Custom hreflang addresses

JBlay · ‎Aug 14, 2023

Hi there -

We're looking to be able to manually edit the hreflang tags in the <head> of our page, to improve our SEO potential. We have a fairly simple custom solution (rather than using Hubspot's built in language tools), that is as follows:

{% if request.path == "/us/" %}

[ Two link tags to the homepage, with the US page as primary and UK page as alternate ]

{% elif request.path is string_containing "/us/" %}

[ Two link tags, with the US page as primary and UK page as alternate ]

{% endif %}

{% if request.path == "/uk/" %}

[ Two link tags to the homepage, with the UK page as primary and US page as alternate ]

{% elif request.path is string_containing "/uk/" %}

[ Two link tags, with the UK page as primary and US page as alternate ]

{% endif %}

The issue arises when:

- We have a page only available in one language, or

- We have a page where there's a different spelling of a word in the URL from US to UK. 'programme' or 'optimisation' for example.

Solutions tried so far:

- Moving this code into a module and adding variables that would let us manually set the links. This did not work however, as the module is moved into the <body> tag by Hubspot automatically.

- Adding the specific page's links to its header under the 'Settings' tab for the page. Not suitable however, as the hreflang links need to be the first thing inside the <head> tag.

Possible solutions:

- Use Javascript to insert the hreflang links in <head> post-page render. However this may be unreliable for 100% of page loads, and/or when the pages are crawled by Google.

- Clone the page template for each page - not really viable time-wise, or version control.

- Manually hard-code each exception to the rule into the original if/elif statements - may be tricky but would give the right outcome.

- Other - has anyone else come up against this problem and has a solution?

Thanks v. much in advance!

PamCotton · ‎Aug 15, 2023

Hello @JBlay, thank you for posting in our Community! Thank you for providing details, it is recommended to implement it with a designer or someone who is familiar with HTML and CSS.

I want to invite our top experts to share their thoughts @danmoyle @StjepanGrcic and @Jnix284 any suggestions for @JBlay matter?

Thank you,

Pam

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danmoyle · ‎Aug 16, 2023

Thanks for thinking of me @PamCotton. This coding is a bit above my head, but I'm going to share it with my colleagues to see if we have ideas for @JBlay 🙂

Did my answer help? Please "mark as a solution" to help others find answers. Plus I really appreciate it!

Dan Moyle

HubSpot Advisor

LearningOps | Impulse Creative

dan@impulsecreative.com

https://impulsecreative.com/

Blog, Website & Page Publishing