When you have multiple resources that contain alternatives of the same content, it helps to create a link association between these resources so that Google can serve the correct version of your content to the user depending on their location, language, or device. Doing this also consolidates the ranking for similar content that you offer. The following kinds of resources benefit from page-level associations:
- AMP versions of your content
- URLs for your mobile-app content
- Mobile-specific alternatives to a desktop site
- International sites
How Google serves alternate URLs
For mobile device users, Google serves URLs in the following preference order:
- AMP page URLs (where supported)
- App URLs
- Mobile-specific website URLs
- Standard website URLs
This means that if you have content available on an AMP page, our systems serve the AMP URL. If you have no AMP content, but you have an app-specific URL, we’ll direct the user to the app itself rather than the alternate web page version. Finally, if you have neither AMP nor app content, we’ll serve a link to your mobile website, if one exists, or to your standard website. Bear in mind that it’s important to address the mobile audience for your site, so make your content available in AMP where possible, and follow our mobile-friendly guidelines to ensure the best Google Search performance and user retention.
For international sites, Google generally determines the correct regional page version to serve based on the geotargeting settings for your site, the server IP for your site, and the country code of the domain. For multilingual sites, use language annotations in your pages.
Learn more
AMP pages Mobile site configuration International SEO
Make your resource associations
Associate your AMP and HTML pages
Google crawls and indexes AMP pages just like standard HTML pages, by using links to them from other pages
or your own canonical pages. Reference AMP pages using the rel=amphtml link attribute in
the header of your standard HTML page.
For specific details on how to do this for multiple scenarios, read Make Your Page Discoverable on the AMP Project website.
Associate your app with your site
To ensure that Search results respond to your app users with your own app content, follow the App Indexing guidelines. App Indexing puts your app in front of users who use Google Search. It works by indexing the URL patterns you provide in your app manifest and using API calls from your app to make content within your app available to both existing and new users.
Learn more
Associate your regional and language URLs
For international sites, certain situations warrant having the rel=alternate
and hreflang= attributes for alternate local or regional versions of your
site’s pages. For example, if your site has pages with fully translated content
in separate languages, you should make the associations between the localized
versions of your content.
Read Use
hreflang for language and regional URLs in the Search Console Help Center.