This year, I wrote several articles related to SEO for Multilingual and Multinational websites (links below). Since we welcomed Google into our professional lives, we’ve seen Google change its stance on many things more frequently than some of us may have wished. Apparently, Google has changed or updated how it treats ccTLDs and Hreflang tags.

What is ccTLD?

ccTLDs are the country code top-level domains. It’s the Internet top-level domain that is reserved for each country with the country code extension. Examples of ccTLD: .jp (Japan), .us (USA), .de (Germany), .uk (UK), .es (Spain). Read more about ccTLDs and the list of ccTLDs here: https://icannwiki.org/Country_code_top-level_domain

ccTLD Impact to SEO

Google and other search engines stated that they look at ccTLD for one of the geo-targeting signals. This means that when a site uses ccTLD, it knows which country the site was created for. For example, if a site uses the “example.es” domain, they understand that the site is designed for Spain. When you have multiple websites, geo-targeting is a very important aspect of managing websites so that people find the content on the right site. This is why many companies choose to have websites with different ccTLDs.

Google’s Comment on ccTLD

“One of the main algorithms that do the whole localization thing… is called something like LDCP – language demotion country promotion. So basically if you have like a .de, then for users in Germany you would get like a slight boost with your .de domain name. But nowadays, with .co or whatever .de, which doesn’t relate to Germany anymore, it doesn’t really make sense for us to like automatically apply that little boost because it’s ambiguous what the target is.”

“I think eventually, like in years’ time, that [ccTLD benefit] will also fade away.”

What is Hreflang Tag?

With or without the ccTLDs, geo-targeting is still a big challenge to many businesses. The wrong geo site showing up translates to a loss of potential business. This is why major search engines including Google and Bing came up with Hreflang Tags allowing the site owners to map the same/equivalent pages to let them know which page should appear in the search results for which language (and country). Read about Hreflang Tag: Hreflang Implementation.

Google’s Comment on Hreflang Tag

“Ultimately, I would want less and less annotations, site annotations, and more automatically learned things.”

What does it Mean for Site Owners?

As Google mentioned, this change won’t happen immediately, which gives the site owners to make necessary adjustments.

If you have ccTLDs, I won’t change them at least for now. There are other benefits than the geo-targeting benefit with ccTLDs. Monitor the analytics data for where the people access each site from.

The same goes for Hreflang tags. I recommend that you keep them, and update them. Do not remove them because of Google’s comment at this time.

What I suggest to all multilingual and multinational website owners is to review and update the content to give more geo signals. If they start to rely more on “leaning” to determine the target language and location, content is the only strong signal they use that you can control. This goes to not just Google, but Bing and other search engines.

My recent articles about SEO for Multilingual and Multinational Websites:

Effective SEO Management Structures For Multilingual And Multinational Websites

Understanding The Unique Challenges Of Multilingual And Multinational Websites

Multinational SEO vs. multilingual SEO: What’s the difference?