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Let say example.com has two different country version apart from main English version

  1. Israel(example.il)
  2. New Zealand(example.nz)

What SEO practice should I follow.

Method 1 - HTML lang

example.com
<html lang="en">
example.il
<html lang="he-IL">
example.nz
<html lang="en-NZ">

Method 2 - HTML hreflang link inside head tag example.com

<head>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" 
      hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.il/" 
      hreflang="he-IL" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.nz/" 
      hreflang="en-NZ" />
</head>

similarly use the same for other pages(example.il,example.nz).

Google says from 2011 they started treating link with hreflang for mentioning language specific content. Now Which method should I use to make the site language and country specific when it comes to search engines?

What is the difference between <html lang> and <link hreflang> ?

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1 Answer 1

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Which method should I use ...

What is the difference between <html lang> and <link hreflang>.

You can use both.

The lang attribute on the html tag informs user-agents the language of the current document.

The hreflang attribute informs user-agents/bots of the location of alternative localised versions of the current document.

In a way they are complementary.

However, Google most probably ignores the lang attribute and auto-detects the document language instead. I believe Google ignores all language identifiers, except for hreflang.

hreflang on the other hand is recommended by Google to help indexing of multi-lingual websites. So, if you needed to choose one or the other then the hreflang would be the one to go for.

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