Google Releases "X-Default hreflang" Tag for International Sites

Google recently presented a new hreflang tag, called x-default hreflang that is designed to tell the search engines which page to serve up if you haven't created a specific page around the language the visitor is looking for. As Google's blog post states:

"The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited. For example, it would be the page our algorithms try to show French-speaking searchers worldwide or English-speaking searchers on google.ca."

What does this mean for you, as a multilingual site owner? The correct use of the "hreflang" tag results in higher rankings of your language specific sites and less likelihood of getting penalized for language specific redirects or content swaps. Adding support for this new feature is just a matter of adding the new tag to your header. Google gave these examples of the various hreflang tags in use in their blog post:

• http://example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK
• http://example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA
• http://example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia
• http://example.com/: The homepage shows users a country selector and is the default page for users worldwide.

"In this case, the webmaster can annotate this cluster of pages using the rel-alternate-hreflang using Sitemaps or using HTML link tags like this:"

More information can be found in the Webmaster's Internationalization Forum.