Use canonical or exact url in hreflang links

garage_greg

We do have a page example.com with different languages example.com/en and example.com/es . We do have variations on the site with query strings, so example.com/en?a=1 and example.com/es?a=1 . Each of these pages has the canonical of /en or /es . Should the hreflang link of example.com/es?a=1 be example.com/en or exmaple.com/en?a=1 ? Meaning should we link the canonical or the actual url?

Originally asked by Robin on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

As a general rule of thumb, you should avoid linking to non-canonical pages as much as possible, because Google uses internal linking signals to check that your canonical tags are correct, and reserves the right to ignore them if that is not the case. With that in mind, it is best to avoid linking to other non-canonical pages using hreflang <link> tags to prevent Google from discovering them if possible, or at least to reduce internal linking to these URLs. Therefore, I would recommend to avoid adding hreflang <link> tags in non-canonical pages . If that is not possible, always use canonical URLs in your hreflang <link> tags . In the case of your example, the hreflang link of...

Full answer by Flopont: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/146168 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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