New International Targeting Tool in Google Webmaster

The new tool “International Targeting” is added in Google webmaster tools to actually help webmasters resolve the issues of hreflang. This feature is to help in troubleshooting hreflang annotations. To make it simple, this attribute enables Google and other search engines to serve the regional versions of pages to searches.

  1. The report helps to identify and debug the following issues:Annotations will be interrupted correctly only if they are confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. Whenever a page, say page1 links to another page2, then there must be a link back from page2 to page1. In case if the expected returning link is missing, then Google reports it as error.
  2. The value of hreflang must be any of the following formats:
  • Language code in ISO 639-1, say for example”es”
  • Combinations of language and country code (ISO 3166-1) say for example “es-AR”