How Zendesk uses hreflang tags in the Help Center for SEO

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.