Multi-region sites: hreflang, locale URLs, and getting all variants indexed

Multi-region SEO is the deep end of indexing. You publish /en-us/page, /en-gb/page, /de-de/page, and /fr-fr/page. Google often picks one as canonical and ignores the rest. Hreflang tags help, but the Indexing API is what gets the variants discovered in the first place.

The locale push workflow

1. Verify each locale subdomain or subdirectory in Search Console as a separate property (if subdomains) or part of the parent property (if subdirectories).
2. Push each locale's URL variant individually.
3. Confirm hreflang tags reference all variants and self-reference correctly.
4. Run Status on each locale variant. If Google has only indexed one, audit the others for canonical conflicts.

Common hreflang failures

• Missing self-reference: every page must include an hreflang pointing to itself.
• Asymmetric references: /en links to /de, but /de doesn't link back. Google ignores both.
• Canonical pointing across locales: /en-gb/page canonicals to /en-us/page → only US indexed.
• Region codes that don't exist (en-uk instead of en-gb).

Per-locale credit math

A site with 100 pages and 5 locales is 500 URLs total. At free quota (20/day indexer), that's 25 days to push everything. Use $9.99 packs (50 credits each) to compress it: 10 packs covers the whole site in a single $99.90 spend. Compare that to the consultant time it'd take to set up programmatic Indexing API access, and the math is friendly.