Router/Controller question for multi-lingual website

Questions & Help Questions
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17

How would your alternate hreflang tags differ from each other? Only through the query parameter ? Something like this for example.com homepage?

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/?locale=en" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/?locale=it" hreflang="it" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="x-default" />

Using query parameters for locale switching is strongly discouraged. I’m not surprised that Google breaks it’s own rules. That’s nothing new.

How Google crawls locale-adaptive pages

If your site has locale-adaptive pages (that is, your site returns different content based on the perceived country or preferred language of the visitor), Google might not crawl, index, or rank all your content for different locales. This is because the default IP addresses of the Googlebot crawler appear to be based in the USA. In addition, the crawler sends HTTP requests without setting Accept-Language in the request header.

IMPORTANT: We recommend using separate locale URL configurations and annotating them with rel=alternate hreflang annotations.

URL parameters
site.com?loc=de
Not recommended.
URL-based segmentation difficult
Users might not recognize geotargeting from the URL alone
Geotargeting in Search Console is not possible