I wanted to ask for some advice on the best way to proceed with hreflang tags on a sitecore site. Currently, we have an English only site but we will be launching 11 more language sites localized in the local language.
Our site is currently set up like www.abccompany.com/en. The other language sites will follow the same style like www.abccompany.com/fr for French, www.abccompany.com/de for German and so on.
When dealing with hreflang tags, there are some options but we are not sure the best way to proceed.
I copied the options directly from this page from Google Webmasters forum here:
HTML link element in header. In the HTML <head> section of http://www.example.com/, add a link element pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage at http://es.example.com/, like this:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />
HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:
Link: <http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"
To specify multiple hreflang values in a Link HTTP header, separate the values with commas like so:
Link: <http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es",<http://de.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="de"
Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap. ([more info here][2])
We also have a store site that is located on a subdomain like this: store.abccompany.com.
We know that there is a sitemap module that could be used for creating Option #3 above which is the sitemap.xml file but in your opinion with dealing with Sitecore sites, which would you recommend? Setting up the html link element in the header and do an HTML header for PDFs (Options #1 &2) or go with a sitemap module to add the hreflangs in the actual sitemap.xml file?
Thanks in advance for any insight you can give on the topic.