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.
2 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:
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