Google's John Mueller said on Twitter he was surprised that so many international SEOs were interested in Google supporting regional hreflang markup. He thought hreflang was complex enough, to support another layer, would be overboard.
Aleyda Solis brought up the concept of regional markup versus country specific markup in a presentation of hers. It got all the way to John Mueller of Google who said on Twitter "I don't think that will happen anytime soon, but I was surprised how many were keen on that (I assumed most would want *less* complexity, not more :-))"
I don't think that will happen anytime soon, but I was surprised how many were keen on that (I assumed most would want *less* complexity, not more :-))
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 16, 2018
Giving SEOs the ability to group their sites by region and not by country can be useful in many cases. I know many SEOs that already have a grip on managing hreflang embrace even more technical and complex uses for it.
Will it ever happen? Who knows but as of now, hreflang doesn't fully support this.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
