Google sitemap HrefLang tag without the main site url

Question

We have websites with multilingual content.

e.g.

• http://www.example.com/about-us/
• http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us/
• http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us/
• http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us/

We need to configure the hreflang tags in sitemap for Google to know that there are alternate links for the same pages in different languages.

I know for the above example that my sitemap url tag would look like this:

  <url>
    <loc>http://www.example.com/about-us</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="http://www.example.com/en-GB/about-us"/>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-HK" href="http://www.example.com/en-HK/about-us"/>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="zn-CH" href="http://www.example.com/zn-CH/about-us"/>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>0.8</priority>
  </url>

However, if I don't have the main url but just the last three ones with en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, then how should my url tag look? Should I just skip the loc tag and keep the three xhtml:link tags? Or can I specify any url in the loc tag and put the remaining two in xhtml:link tags?

I am new to Google sitemaps. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Rashmi

Edit: From the answer posted on sitemap for domain with multilanguage site, for my example with sites in en-HK, en-GB and zn-CH, should there be three url tags, with each of them assigned to loc with the other two in xhtml:link?

Answer 1

Ok. Found the answer at:

Help Google serve the correct language to your visitors

We need to have a url tag for each of the url and specify the others as alternate urls.