Hi! We have a website (apptamin.com). We're starting to target the Chinese market and therefore decided to do a localized website (apptamin.cn - not live yet) in Chinese. It will be localized in terms of content, but also optimized for Baidu SEO. We are using WPEngine, and I created a new install there with the same content that we plan to put on their Linode servers in Japan (what seems to be recommended). I'm just a bit worried that this new install with basically the same content (although it's in Chinese) could harm our existing website and its rankings? Can anyone confirm (or not) that using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" the should be enough (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en)? No need to use canonical?
You'll want to also make sure to translate your image alt tags, and only Google uses rel=canonical, so you might be better off using the “content-language” meta tag for all of the other engines you're targeting. Baidu and Bing use the meta tag instead.
FYI. This is the best guide I've seen on hreflang tags yet: https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide and I use this hreflang testing tool frequently: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/
Answered 8 years ago
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