Thursday, May 24, 2012
In December 2011 we
announced annotations
for sites that target users in many languages and, optionally, countries. These annotations define
a cluster of equivalent pages that target users around the world, and were implemented using
rel-alternate-hreflang link elements
in the HTML of each page in the cluster.
Based on webmaster feedback and other considerations, today we're adding support for specifying
the rel-alternate-hreflang annotations in
sitemaps.
Using sitemaps instead of HTML link elements offers many advantages including smaller page size
and easier deployment for some websites.
To see how this works, let's take a simple example: We wish to specify that for the URL https://www.example.com/en, targeting English language users, the equivalent URL targeting German language speakers https://www.example.com/de. Up till now, the only way to add such annotation is to use a link element, either as an HTTP header or as HTML elements on both URLs like this:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.example.com/en" > <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://www.example.com/de" >
As of today, you can alternately use the following equivalent markup in sitemaps:
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/en</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="https://www.example.com/de" />
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://www.example.com/en" />
</url>
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/de</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="de"
href="https://www.example.com/de" />
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://www.example.com/en" />
</url>
Briefly, the new sitemaps tags shown in bold function in the same way as the HTML link tags, with both using the same attributes. The full technical details of how the annotations are implemented in sitemaps, including how to implement the xhtml namespace for the link tag, are in our new Help Center article.
A more detailed example can be found in our new Help Center article, and if you need more help, please ask in our brand new internationalization help forum.