International SEO

International Targeting in Google Search Console

Deprecated: Google has retired the International Targeting report in Search Console. The country targeting setting is gone, and hreflang errors are no longer reported there. See Google's announcement for details.

The International Targeting report used to let site owners pick a country target for a generic TLD and surface site-wide hreflang errors. Both features have been removed.

What changed

  • Country targeting was removed. Google now derives geographic relevance from signals like ccTLDs, hreflang, server location, and on-page content. There is no manual override anymore.
  • The Language tab (hreflang error report) was removed. Google no longer surfaces site-wide hreflang validation inside Search Console.

Use hreflang instead

Hreflang annotations remain the supported way to tell Google which language and region a URL is intended for. Add them on the page (<link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." href="...">), in your XML sitemap, or via HTTP headers, and make sure every variant points back to every other variant (including a self-reference). See Hreflang in Google Search Console for the implementation rules.

How to validate hreflang now

Because Search Console no longer flags hreflang issues, validate with a third-party crawler (Screaming Frog, Sitebulb, Ahrefs) or by inspecting individual URLs in the URL Inspection tool. Common things to check: return tags exist on every alternate, language codes are valid ISO 639-1 (and region codes are ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2), and alternates resolve with HTTP 200.

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