Does JSitemap create hreflang tags?

Hello Steve and thanks for interest,

if you mean the hreflang XML sitemap it's not generated by JSitemap. We analyzed this opportunity but it's not really useful because in the case of a multilanguage sitemap for Joomla, each language has its own separated sitemap including links with the language prefix.

In this case Google already knows exactly which links belong to the corresponding language.

Cheers,

John

Thanks for the quick reply John. The point of the hreflang tag is to tell search engines the targeted language/country for a page. It's a hint about which country's search engine is appropriate. For example, Google has 25 English speaking search engines. Very importantly, it prevents penalties for duplicate content.

For my site most of the pages are identical, but there may be variations such as pricing, so the URL structure is something like:
mysite.com/en-us/producta for English in the US and pricing in dollars
mysite.com/en-in/producta for English in India and pricing in rupees
mysite.com/es-us/producta for Spanish in the US and pricing in dollars

Hreflang was created to simplify international SEO, and without it, international SEO is infinitely harder.

Thanks for the explanation Steve.
We talked with some SEO expert about this argument and we was told that having URLs such as yours with language tag:
mysite.com/en-us/producta
mysite.com/en-in/producta
mysite.com/es-us/producta

is not useful having also the hreflang map. It's only useful for cases where the urls are duplicated, i mean same urls but different languages in the page contents. Your urls are not duplicated.
However if you have consistent arguments and hints about the utility of this map, please post in the wishlist and we will evaluate again this development.

Thanks a lot,
John

I must admit that I haven't read anything like that, but then again nobody would accuse me of being an SEO expert. If true my life is greatly simplified.

I'm going to post the question on a couple of SEO forums. I sure hope they say the same thing.

Thanks,
Steve

Thanks Steve

However this seems an interesting question... also the next week i will have the occasion to talk with some other SEO expert and i will try to ask the same. Keep posted here.

John