Overview
Part of having an online support presence is making sure your Help Center is configured optimally for SEO–your customers need to find you when they need you! Help Centers localized to multiple languages need to have special considerations for SEO–Zendesk does this automatically in the manner described below.
Details
Help Centers with a single language variant will have a "canonical" tag in the site header, which tells search engines that this URL is the source URL (or original content page) for your Help Center. Using a US English site as an example, that looks like this:
href="https://support.rebrandly.com/hc/en-us" rel="canonical"
Once a Help Center is localized into multiple languages, Zendesk will include hreflang tags in the header in addition to the canonical tag. These tags allow search engines to properly index the alternate language sites for searches in each respective language. To build on the example above, introducing a Spanish language variant will result in the following: link href="https://subdomain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us" rel="canonical"
link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://subdomain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us"
link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://subdomain.zendesk.com/hc/es"
If you have your Help Center host mapped to your own domain (which is another tip to boost SEO), the links will of course be in the form of subdomainofchoice.domain.com.
6 Comments
Hello Matt, thanks for the information above. Our support portal hreflang is showing only "en", how can we add "-US": "en-US"?
Hi Yeni!
The default language of your Help Center is currently set to English. Therefore, all requests are redirected to the locale defined as the default one for English - which in Zendesk is defined as en-us.
As per Google's guidelines:
It's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically unspecified users if you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the same language, but in different locales (...) In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK.
As there aren't any other languages/ locales defined for your Help Center and to comply with Google's guidelines, the hreflang tag will be defined as:
Hi Alexander and Matt,
Thanks for the help above. When we've been doing SEMRush site audits, we've been getting flagged for conflicting canonical and hreflang links, as they are the same on our support site.
<link rel="canonical" href="https://support.joinhomebase.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000198372-Rosters-PINS-Permission-Access" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://support.joinhomebase.com/hc/en-us/articles/115000198372-Rosters-PINS-Permission-Access" />
We only have our support site in one language, so is there a way to get rid of the hreflang link entirely?
From SEMRush:
"This page has hreflang conflicts within its source code. To avoid any conflicts, we recommend that you review your hreflang attributes and fix conflicting hreflang and rel=canonical URLs."
I concur with Ryan's request above. We have the same error come up on our SEMRush site audits. Is this being looked at?
Hi team,
Any updates here?
Thanks,
Ryan
@Ryan it looks like you had a ticket open with us regarding this issue and as it turns out, there are no plans to change this functionality within Zendesk Guide at this time. We on the Community team are rather limited on what else we can assist with on our end so feel free to reply back to that ticket if you have any other questions :)
@Daniel, see my response to Ryan above :) Apologies for not being able to provide a fix for you!
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