[TUTORIAL] How to target multiple countries using this simple WP Hack.

[Bela Padilla]

Thank you for sharing the tutorial, it was very helpful. I appreciate your contribution.

 

[Turbo B.]

I do not understand - what should be in a final source code of the page?

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.site.com/article" hreflang="us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.site.com/article" hreflang="x-default" />

and

<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.site.com/article" hreflang="tr" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.site.com/article" hreflang="fr" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.site.com/article" hreflang="de" />

etc.
Right?

But how G will pick up different language meta title and description for each language?

 

[tylero]

After testing multiple niches, hacks and so on, i recently discovered a simple hack that i use on my website that is not even 2 months old. It's working very good and it has generated very good trafic.
The secret? Keyword Intent

What is KW Intent from my point of view?

For example you have the main keyword "X". This has a search volume of 200K (example). The keyword is very difficult to rank, and most of the traffic is coming from EN sites. But what people forgot is that X is searched in multiple countries. So, to target and get a lot of trafic of the KW "X", i am gonna use foreign languages, where "X" is popular too.

After this the keyword will become "X in foreign language". This way, i manage to rank always in top 10 and drive crazy traffic with minimum effort. (Keep in mind all my articles are 40-100 words long). Here are some results:

View attachment 336656

But, for most of the times, a single keyword can be popular in more countries. So, i am gonna explain how to target 2 different languages with a simple script.

First of all, be sure your Wordpress Tags can be indexable.
As always, try to write the article in your main language. Then, in Yoast SEO modify the Tags Page Title and meta description in a second foreign language, that is gonna look good with the keyword you try to rank for.

Add This script in functions.php of your WP Theme:

function generate_links()
{
    if (is_single())
    {
        global $post;

        $current_page = home_url($wp->request);
        $current_language = get_locale();
        $tags = get_the_tags($post->ID);

        echo '<link rel="alternate" href="' . esc_url($current_page) . '/" hreflang="' . esc_url($current_language) . '" />' . "\n";
        echo '<link rel="alternate" href="' . esc_url($current_page) . '/" hreflang="x-default" />' . "\n";

        if ($tags)
        {
            $first_tag = $tags[0];
            $first_link = get_tag_link($tag->term_id);

            echo '<link rel="alternate" href="' . esc_url($first_link) .'" hreflang="tr" />' . PHP_EOL;
        }
    }
}

add_action('wp_head', 'generate_links');

Now, you will rank for a keyword in 2 different languages. I am not sure if i explained good at all, but you will catch it.
If you think i helped you, a simple reaction is enought.

Do not forget to modify the this line:

echo '<link rel="alternate" href="' . esc_url($first_link) .'" hreflang="tr" />' . PHP_EOL;

Replace "TR" with your second language you want to target.
With this, i managed to completly remove Multilingual Plugins. For me, it has worked like a charm, give it a try and let me know your results.

What will the final HTML look like? Can you post an example?

 

[nocreigefohoi6917]

Thank you for posting this, I really appreciate it.

 

[getrattuveitta9045]

I appreciate you posting this.

 

[Sarah Mathews]

Thanks for sharing!! Great work!!

 

[deepforme]

I hope you will share more

 

[LondoN eXtream]

This is how Yoast Seo Tag Configuration along with my piece of code should look.

<meta name="description" content="Noah&#039;s Ark (2024) filmini altyazılı çevrimiçi izleyin" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />

This is Meta Description generated by Yoast.

Then:

<link rel="alternate" href="url to main post" hreflang="ro" />
<link rel="alternate" href="main post" hreflang="x-default" />
<link rel="alternate" href="url to tag page" hreflang="tr" />

This should be present on the article HTML code and not on tag page html

And this is how it's done. Hope that helps everyone. So far this could work for movies, recipes and i think most of the niches.

 

[laur.laurix]

I think people searching for that keyword doing that because they don't understand english
so no point for me to target they keyword and when they will visit the page they won't find what they are looking for or they won't find the language they understand so they will leave
or Im missing something

Like the man said for some niches this method will work....for some it won't....like the given example even if you don't know English and you land on a watch free online movie website and you see the player and the play button most people will press that and probably get to watch some ads before the movie and the webmaster gets paid.

 

[LondoN eXtream]

Like the man said for some niches this method will work....for some it won't....like the given example even if you don't know English and you land on a watch free online movie website and you see the player and the play button most people will press that and probably get to watch some ads before the movie and the webmaster gets paid.

Yes, as i said, you have to workout if my hack will work for your niche.

I think all the back hat things depends on how you work out the tips and tricks on the internet.

For recipes niche, this hack could be an advantage aswell. Same for cars, tech and so on, you just have to figure it out how to make the user understand your content after they land on the page. For example, after using this simple hack, you can use a simple auto-translate plugin for wordpress so you have 100% retention on your article.

 

[Turbo B.]

View attachment 345275

This is how Yoast Seo Tag Configuration along with my piece of code should look.

<meta name="description" content="Noah&#039;s Ark (2024) filmini altyazılı çevrimiçi izleyin" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />

This is Meta Description generated by Yoast.

Then:

<link rel="alternate" href="url to main post" hreflang="ro" />
<link rel="alternate" href="main post" hreflang="x-default" />
<link rel="alternate" href="url to tag page" hreflang="tr" />

This should be present on the article HTML code and not on tag page html

And this is how it's done. Hope that helps everyone. So far this could work for movies, recipes and i think most of the niches.

So G sees that there is an alternate page for this article in TR -

<link rel="alternate" href="url to tag page" hreflang="tr" />

visits it and gets meta title and description in TR language but empty page.
But instead it (tag page), G ranks the main post which is in RO language - in RO and TR locations?

 

[LondoN eXtream]

So G sees that there is an alternate page for this article in TR -

visits it and gets meta title and description in TR language but empty page.
But instead it (tag page), G ranks the main post which is in RO language - in RO and TR locations?

My main RO page ranks for keywords in RO.
The tag page in TR ranks for low volume keywords in turkish.

For me this experiment bring just some extra visitors.

Of course, you can always edit your tag page so it would not be empty, so it has higher chance of ranking for more keywords and bring more traffic.

 

[Loree]

Not sure if I understood your method correctly but it seems you are simply trying to do multi language without a plugin.

While many plugins in that area are massive and/or expensive & massive, I use a rather well known very lightweight and unobtrusive plugin for this: Bogo is a WP plugin made by the creator of Contact Form 7 (the #1 most popular WP plugin)

It takes care of hreflang additions to the source code of each page and also keeps track of the language versions of every post or page in the backend. While you are on one post, it'll display links to the corresponding language versions of the post in the top right corner.

All the translations are left to you. The plugin allows for very fine grained and complete translations of a site and even using different images, or images with different file names etc., different slugs and different category names and so on.

Very tiny and does just the right things in my opinion. It is free, too.

Attention: While you create new language versions of a page/post in the background, the plugin already starts putting their hreflang tags into the source code although you have not "published" the post yet. That is kinda unfortunate but you can fix it by either not "preparing" different languages for a post and letting them sit there, but immediately also publish them.

Alternatively, there are also various WordPress filters available in the plugin that you can use to adjust. One particular filter can be used to hide a new language completely until you are ready to actually publish the posts.



P.S: I agree that language versions can be beneficial for SEO. We see some traffic and it's rising. Ironically, we have all our good, old rankings for German Queries in the US, of course with much lower search volume. It seems that the algorithm pushes us down specifically in German speaking countries only.

Mueller from Google said in one of his vague posts something to the effect of "what's the point of having a language version if the content is the same, just in another language" hinting that Google does not view it favourably. Basically meaning "uh, we (Google) can translate on the fly so what's the point".

It works though. I suggest to not make the language version "identical" though. The plugin Bogo allows for individually developing the various language versions of posts over time. Just like Wikipedia's language versions are quite different.