Benefits of HREFLang Builder
There are a number of key benefits to using our HREFLang Builder:
Time and Cost Savings:
Without HREFLang Builder, a global company typically spends 20 to 50 hours to manually develop and implement HREFLang XML Site Maps. Due to the size of the files and number of URL’s it cannot be managed in Excel. The alternative is to embed HREFLang elements in the pages which adds 3kb to 80kb of text depending on the number of entries slowing down pages. Additionally, estimated development costs between $15k to $60k and 3 to 6 months to add to the CMS.
For an organized site, using HREFLang Builder takes less than 1 hour to implement.
Importing & Mapping Alternative Pages to Each Other
HREFLang Builder imports URL’s from existing XML maps, Excel, CSV, Deep Crawl and Screaming Frog segmenting them into countries and language. The HREFLang element works by telling the search engine that pages B and C are alternative language versions of page A. You then have to state that they also alternate to each other.
We built a Regular Expression Engine that would detect one of 127 different URL structure formats used to designate country and/or language. By using regex rules, we can accommodate for the use of multiple variations and even parameters in the URL’s which makes this scalable for even the most dysfunctional web operations team.
Error Detection and Management
Submitting hundreds of error-laden XML site maps can be devastating to a site’s crawl budget. Search engines will reduce their crawl rate significantly if even 1% of the submitted pages in a site map have errors resulting in significant missing pages. URL’s are checked for robots, canonical, and header rules. By excluding pages with errors from the final XML exports we ensure that 100% of submitted URL’s can be indexed quickly maximizing crawl allocation. These error reports can be exported and shared.
Dynamic Updates
Manual updates would labor intensive so once a job is created it can be refreshed automatically at the desired interval then export or upload new XML files.
Missing Language Pages Monitoring
Our Missing Pages mapping function was originally developed to find gaps in country URL lists. It has become a popular tool to monitor missing, non-localized and in some cases, rogue market pages. As many CMS systems do not create a page if it has not been localized many pages may be missing from dynamic XML site maps.
The implementation of HREFLang XML site maps has lead to significant opportunity recovery for clients, which is the reason this product should be used by every multinational to quickly and easily manage the inclusion and of their global XML site maps.