My site has no hreflang tags!

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Orange Mantra: Hello Frds,
  
  I need your help.
  My website has HREFLANG tag like <link rel="alternate" href="http://www.orangemantra.com" hreflang="en-us=" /> but in webmaster tool m getting this msg: Your site has no hreflang tags.
  Google uses hreflang tags to match the user's language preference to the right variation of your pages., kindly let me know that how can I resolve this problem
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  Edwin Jonk: rel alternate href lang is used for multi-regional and/or multilingual sites. Therefore, the page needs to have an alternate page in a particular language and/or targeted to a particular region. By that hreflang needs to be bi-directional. ;
  
  Do you have a site in a different language?
• 
  Masatake Wasa: As +Edwin Jonk ;mentioned, hreflang is used to point equivalent pages in different language-locales, such as when you have a page with more or less the same content except for contact details in a different country.
  
  It seems that you want to use the hreflang to target the US market, at least on the home page. If that's your intention, use your WMT account to target the US (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/62399). There are stray meta geo information pointing to a place in Chicago: as far as I am aware, Google ignores these, but I think it's something to be avoided.
  
  You have different pages for different locales detailing the services you offer, so in these instances it probably makes sense to implement hreflang (en-us, en-gb, en-ca, en-au), since you'd want US visitors to end up on the US page, the UK visitors on the UK page, etc. For the US and UK versions (.../wordpress-web-developer-us-new-york-washington-maryland-california-utah/ and .../wordpress-developer-united-kingdom-london-birmingham-glasgow-liverpool-leeds/), it looks a little like keyword stuffing.
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  Athanasios Giannias: A bilingual site targeted for one country, is hreflang needed? Configuring only Geo targeting in WMT is enough? 
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  Masatake Wasa: +Athanasios Giannias: if the content on the pages is essentially the same expressed in different languages, then I'd implement hreflang on a page-by-page basis. Hreflang establishes equivalence between languages or language-locales. Hreflang cannot be used to target locales. In order to target a locale, regardless of language, I'd use WMT.
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  Edwin Jonk: A bilingual site targeted for one country, is hreflang needed?
  
  I would argue no. If you have a ccTLD and a clear URL structure, it will work. For example, you have example.be, than example.be/nl would serve the Flemish content and example.be/fr would serve the Walloon content. Note that I am using fr and nl because Flemish nor Walloon is part of ISO 639-1 [1] and I am also using .be, so it is auto-geo-targeted in GWT.
  
  However Google strongly suggest that you use hreflang too:
  
  In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.
  
  [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes ;
  [2] ;https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
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  Athanasios Giannias: thanks +Masatake Wasa ;+Edwin Jonk ;very helpful
• 
  Ankit Goyal: Its right.
• 
  Anwer Ashif: tnls
• 
  AVVN Technologies Pvt. Ltd.: I need your help. My website has HREFLANG tag like but in webmaster tool m getting this msg: Your site has no hreflang tags. kindly let me know that how can I resolve this problem. So i can`t know how can use it my website.
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  yamunaspecbee g: As far as I know the "hreflang" attribute is used by webmasters to clarify the language & geo targeting of the website (http://specbee.com/). But I notice that some of the websites do not have this particular attribute, but are still ranking in SERP ( Google.com from USA ). This has put me into a thought on whether the "hreflang" attribute has an effect on International SEO? Any input on this will be really helpful.
• 
  yamunaspecbee g: As far as I know the "hreflang" attribute is used by webmasters to clarify the language & geo targeting of the website (http://www.specbee.com). But I notice that some of the websites do not have this particular attribute, but are still ranking in SERP ( Google.com from USA ). This has put me into a thought on whether the "hreflang" attribute has an effect on International SEO? Any input on this will be really helpful.
• 
  Sunil Kumar: I have query - What if like website dont have hreflang="en-us" tag in url who only want to be in one country like India . Client website designed by me https://w3services.net dont have any hreflang="en-us" tag will I have to define same on each and every link ? How important is this ?