Google: We Don't Understand Regions; We Do Understand Countries & Metros

The other day, Gary Illyes from Google posted on Twitter that they spent over 30 minutes reviewing hreflang codes with MENA, EU, ASIA, etc. region codes and confirmed "they are not working" as expected. In short, Google uses hreflang for countries not for regions.

Gary said "we don't extract a language even from something like fr-eu, let alone use it in ranking." "our current infrastructure is not capable of understanding regions, just countries and in some cases metros," he added. Why not? Why shouldn't Google figure out regions within countries?

Gary said he doesn't think it is useful. He said he is actually "also skeptical about the merits of introducing this"." If you place markup like es-latam on a page, does that mean Brazil and French Guiana should get a Spanish page? There's also no one language for EU or Asia, and defaulting to one is not necessarily good for users," he added.

Here are the tweets:

We spent over half an hour with @suzukik looking at hreflang examples with MENA, EU, ASIA, etc. region codes in hreflang and I'm happy to report they are not working. We don't extract a language even from something like fr-eu, let alone use it in ranking. pic.twitter.com/SCmLzxvDJC

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 25, 2018

I'm also skeptical about the merits of introducing this. If you place markup like es-latam on a page, does that mean Brazil and French Guiana should get a Spanish page? There's also no one language for EU or Asia, and defaulting to one is not necessarily good for users. 2/2

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 26, 2018

Here are some more tweets from Googlers on the topic:

Having 1 URL with multiple hreflang is fine, I don't see a problem with that (other than maintenance on your end). Having tons of URLs for each hreflang just "dilutes" the value of your content, I'd avoid that. Gotta know when to localize, and when to fold together.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) July 25, 2018

If the language / location doesn't match any of the known pairs, we have to determine the most relevant one ourselves - it's undefined.

— John ☆.o(≧▽≦)o.☆ (@JohnMu) July 25, 2018

That's simply bad targeting. Those countries in your example were the motivators for coming up with hreflang in the first place. Hreflang solves it in search results if correctly implemented

— Gary "鯨理" Illyes (@methode) July 26, 2018

This may be why Google considers hreflang one of the most complex topics in SEO.

Forum discussion at Twitter.