Website Changes: Impact on SEO and Google Recommendations

A question about the massive changes to the website was asked on Reddit. It was about a website supporting ten languages, and changes were being made to hreflang. John Mueller of Google gave a general answer about the challenges that can arise in making such changes and emphasized the importance of simplification.

"I'm working on a site with 10 languages and 20 culture codes. Let's say blog-abc was published in all languages. The hreflang tags in all languages point to the version of blog-abc according to the language. For en, it might be en/blog-abc. They updated the English version and the URL was updated to blog-def. The hreflang tag on the English blog page for en will be updated to en/blog-def. However. it won't be dynamically updated in other languages. They will still point to the hreflang tags in other languages. Since we are trying to make the pages as static as possible, the options we have are to update the hreflang tags periodically (say once a month). you think there is another option, that would also be helpful.”

• 📌 It is important to understand that large website changes can take time to process. That's why John Mueller recommends using stable URLs.
• 📌 The effectiveness of the complex structure of the site should be checked, because often simplification can bring more benefits.

🚀 When making changes to a website, it is important to consider that Google needs time to re-evaluate the quality and relevance of the site. Mueller emphasized that this process can take from several months to six months, and sometimes more.