I need a help with sitemaps and multilingualism. I have a web store the operates on three markets (German, Austrian and Slovenian) and the languages available are English, German and Slovenian.
I would like to explain it through example:
1) 10 days ago I sent a sitemap with this structure in GSC:
<url>
<loc>https://example.com</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-au" href="https://example.com"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="si" href="https://example.com"/>
<lastmod>2022-01-08</lastmod>
</url>
The language in the web shop is determined by the IP address of the visitor, and I expected that my page would magically display sites with Slovenian and German languages to Google crawlers, when necessary.
When I got the results, it was clearly obvious that I made a mistake. For each of the alternatives, Google crawler received exactly the same version of the website, in English...
Therefore, only English-language pages were detected.
2) When I saw what I did, I corrected the URLs, lastmod property, and the way the website determines the language for each user. So, I finally resubmitted the sitemap to GSC.
In this case, when the Google crawler opens, for example, the page https://example.com/de, the website in German language opens, regardless of the IP addres.
<url>
<loc>https://example.com</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-au" href="https://example.com/de"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="si" href="https://example.com/si"/>
<lastmod>2022-01-16</lastmod>
</url>
However, the GSC now read the sitemap but did not discover any new URLs (for example Slovenian and German language websites).
How can I solve this entanglement the fastest?
lastmodvalue from sitemaps. I'm not sure what you are can do here, but updating thelastmodwon't have any effect.https://example.com/detagged with bothdeandde-au? If you have a separate version of the content for German speakers in Austria, you need a separate URL for that too. (Plus the country code for Austria isAT.AUis for Australia.)