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I'd always understood that, because there is no en-EU IETF tag, to target Europe I'd have to either use en or list out an hreflang for each country within Europe.
Looking at the source of Think With Google, I noticed the following:
<link rel="alternate" href="//thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/es-419/" hreflang="es-419" />
Which appears to use a UN M.49 code to indicate Spanish for the Latin America and Caribbean region.
The UN M.49 Wikipedia page also lists a code for Europe - 150.
Does it follow that I could have the following hreflang tag to indicate English for the European market?
<link rel="alternate" href="//example.com/intl/en-150/" hreflang="en-150" />
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Although x-default hreflang attributes are optional, Google recommends them as a way for you to “control the page when no languages match.” SEO best practice is to use x-default tags for all hreflang annotations.
Hreflang language codes are two-letter language codes used in hreflang tags to indicate the language that a web page is in. As you may already know, hreflang tags are HTML code snippets that signal to search engines the language and geographical region for which a particular web page was created.
Introduced by Google in December 2011, the hreflang attribute allows you to show search engines what the relationship is between web pages in alternate languages. It's useful when you've created content that's specific to a local audience.
There are three methods for implementing hreflang on your website that you can choose from: In the header section of the HTML code of each page. In XML sitemaps. In the HTTP header of each page.
In the Google docs it states the hreflang format consists of XX-YY where:
By this it is conceivable that "en-eu" is actually correct as ISO_3166-1 #EU is noted as being "reserved on request of ISO 4217/MA for the European monetary unit Euro" which dating back to 1998. It specifically lists "eu" code relating to the ".eu" top level domain.
Most of the talk on the net around "en-eu" seems to be option rather than evidence based or direct from Google.
It would be worth running some experiments on "en-eu". I have also asked for more details on this in the Google doc as they specifically show examples for GBP and USD but ignore Euro.
Based on above "en-eu" make the most sense if reserved codes are considered valid to Google Bot.
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