Google sitemap HrefLang tag without the main site url
- by Rashmi Pandit
We have websites with multilingual content.
e.g.
http://www.example.com/about-us/
http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us/
http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us/
http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us/
We need to configure the hreflang tags in sitemap for Google to know that there are alternate links for the same pages in different languages.
I know for the above example that my sitemap url tag would look like this:
<url>
<loc>http://www.example.com/about-us</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-HK" href="http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="zn-CH" href="http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us"/>
<changefreq>daily</changefreq>
<priority>0.8</priority>
</url>
However, if I don't have the main url but just the last three ones with en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, then how should my url tag look? Should I just skip the loc tag and keep the three xhtml:link tags? Or can I specify any url in the loc tag and put the remaining two in xhtml:link tags?
I am new to Google sitemaps. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Rashmi
Edit:
From the answer posted on http://stackoverflow.com/questions/18423624/sitemap-for-domain-with-multilanguage-site/18423803#18423803, for my example with sites in en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, should there be three url tags, with each of them assigned to loc with the other two in xhtml:link?
