All of them have one, two or even many problems. There are things that are simply a problem to tag on certain websites. We have already discuss how to solve indexing problems from headers or indexing from robots, but let’s look at two possibilities that sitemaps do provide us with to replace specific tags.
Marking hreflang from the sitemap:
Hreflangs are a kind of implementation in sites targeting various geographic regions or simply languages. Their definition is actually simple: from each web page I must indicate in its header and using <link rel=»alternate» hreflang /> tags its equivalent URLs in another language.
This seems very simple in practice if
Your website does not have these equivalences already made (something very common in free CMSs where this multi-language orientation had not moj database been plann from the beginning), or if the layouts are especially rigid, it can be hell for programmers.
In these cases, we should know that
We have another option: indicating these relationships in the sitemap files instead of (or in addition to) on the website. Its use is just as simple: in each <url/> of the sitemap we indicate, in addition to the <loc> node, several <xhtml:link/> nodes with an experiment with hygiene packages the equivalents of that URL in other languages. The problem remains the same: we must identify all possible translations in each URL, but at least we have another place (often more programm for SEO) where we can do this work.
You can see how to develop these sitemaps here , or simply follow the example below:
We run the risk of exceing the maximum size. And this is a method that is certainly not equivalent to a good canonical tag, but it can help us in certain moments when we have content cannibalizations (understood as cannibaliz internal duplicate tg data content in which one ranks above another, making the second URL totally useless).