Hi community,
I need your help regarding Shopify configuration for international sales, and generated hreflang markup.
I've taken over the work on a single store selling in multiple countries. I've spotted a weird HTML hreflang setup.
Basically, hreflang tags are all localized to Germany for some reason - no matter the languages. See below.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://domain.com">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-DE" href="https://domain.com">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-DE" href="https://domain.com/de">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-DE" href="https://domain.com/es">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-DE" href="https://domain.com/fr">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="it-DE" href="https://domain.com/it">
So basically, Shopify automatically generates hreflang tags telling Google that all languages available target people browsing from Germany. You see the problem here.
Context:
- The shop provides 5 languages - English, German, Spanish, French and Italian - through a translation app.
- Default store language is English.
- Current primary market in Shopify Markets (beta) is set to Germany.
- Current international URL structure is Primary domain only (This market uses the primary domain for your online store.). So one subfolder per published language.
- The store relies on Shopify Payments to show local currencies to customers worldwide. There is no local content or specificities today. The price reverts to default currency (EUR) at checkout.
In my opinion, the easiest setup today would be to keep the language URL structure AND to strip the localization on hreflang markup as below. So hreflang markup would be telling Google to target people according to language only, not language-country condition.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://domain.com">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://domain.com">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://domain.com/de">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://domain.com/es">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://domain.com/fr">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="it" href="https://domain.com/it">
When I ask Shopify about this issue, customer support stops responding. Or tell me it's possible for them to disable the automatic hreflang generation of the store. But I'd like to stay out of the code and navigate the best way possible within the Settings interface. Still no answer.
My ultimate question is:
Is the current hreflang markup the result of a bad configuration on this website (regarding Shopify Markets / other Shopify settings),
OR is Shopify expecting website owners to localize every language available to countries where they are commonly spoken (and where the store enables checkout)?
Thanks for your feedback.
