Google sitemap HrefLang tag without the main site url

Question

We have websites with multilingual content.

e.g.

• http://www.example.com/about-us/
• http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us/
• http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us/
• http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us/

We need to configure the hreflang tags in sitemap for Google to know that there are alternate links for the same pages in different languages.

I know for the above example that my sitemap URL tag would look like this:

  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/about-us</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us"/>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-HK" href="http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us"/>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="zn-CH" href="http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us"/>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>

However, if I don't have the main URL but just the last three ones with en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, then how should my URL tag look? Should I just skip the loc tag and keep the three xhtml:link tags? Or can I specify any URL in the loc tag and put the remaining two in xhtml:link tags?

I am new to Google sitemaps. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Rashmi

Edit: From the answer posted on https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18423624/sitemap-for-domain-with-multilanguage-site/18423803#18423803, for my example with sites in en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, should there be three URL tags, with each of them assigned to loc with the other two in xhtml:link?

Answer 1

Ok. Found the answer at:

Help Google serve the correct language to your visitors

We need to have a url tag for each of the url and specify the others as alternate urls.

Answer 2

In terms of SEO, according to Yoast, you should include all the pages in your list of alternate links, like so:

<url>
  <loc>http://www.example.com/about-us</loc>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://www.example.com/about-us"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-HK" href="http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="zh-CN" href="http://www.example.com/zh-CN/about-us"/>
  <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="http://www.example.com/about-us"/>
  <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
  <priority>0.8</priority>
</url>

(Note: I assume your default page is "en-US", but I do not specify the "US" on purpose.)

And as you're at it, you could include an x-default line as well.

Further, the languages which are not alternative of the same language should not include the region. So I would replace the "zh-CN" with "zh" (Chinese is zh, I'm not sure what zn-CH would be?). That way, if you are not specifically in China but still want to read Chinese, you get the "zh" page which should work for you (more or less. I know Chinese vary quite a bit between regions, contrary to French or English, which differences are often just in spelling or choice of words.)