Q: After migrating our multi-country site, the wrong language version started ranking in each market. Help?
A: Disorienting, but it points to one thing. Short answer: your hreflang tags likely broke in the move — still referencing old-domain URLs or dropped entirely — so Google can't tell which version belongs to which country.
Long answer: hreflang tells Google "show the /fr page to French users, /de to Germans." During migration these tags often keep pointing at old URLs (now redirecting) or get stripped by a new template. Google then guesses, surfacing the wrong-language page in a market. It also needs to be reciprocal — each version must point back at the others, all on the new domain.
The fix:
— Update every hreflang to the new live URLs
— Confirm tags are reciprocal and self-referencing
— Validate with a crawler's hreflang report
Next step: crawl your international pages, check the hreflang report for old URLs or missing return tags, and fix them.
Migration Helpdesk
@MigrationHelpdesk
Q: After migrating our multi-country site, the wrong language version started ranking in each market. Help?
Этот пост опубликован в Telegram-канале Migration Helpdesk. Подписаться можно по ссылке: @MigrationHelpdesk.