Google Says Cross Linking Language/Country Versions Won’t Have A Negative Ranking Impact

Google’s John Mueller was asked if there can be some sort of negative impact when it comes to cross linking your language or country versions of your pages. In which John said “I can’t think of any reason why cross-linking your language/country versions of pages would have a negative impact.”

John added on Twitter that not only is there no negative impact, he said there is only positive to gain from it. He said “It just makes everything much easier, for users, and for search engines.”

Also, the question was specific to orphaned product issues derived from the cross linking, and he said nope. He said, “I don’t think you’d run into issues with “orphaned products”.” Adding that “cross-linking language/country versions of pages is always a good idea imo.”

Here are those tweets:

I don’t think you’d run into issues with “orphaned products”, but cross-linking language/country versions of pages is always a good idea imo.

— ? johnmu.xml (personal) ? (@JohnMu) May 12, 2022

I can’t think of any reason why cross-linking your language/country versions of pages would have a negative impact. It just makes everything much easier, for users, and for search engines.

— ? johnmu.xml (personal) ? (@JohnMu) May 12, 2022

I do love how much effort this SEO put into his tweet to catch the attention of John and get a response (not that John doesn’t respond to a heck of a lot of low effort tweets).

Forum discussion at Twitter.