Standards
Research Methodology
Every Hreflanova guide follows the same method: choose markets that can be sourced, rely on primary documents, date everything, test syntax locally, and say clearly what was not measured.
1. Market selection
We cover a market only when two conditions hold: a licensing route for online gambling exists, and its rules can be sourced from the regulator, the legislation or an official register. The current markets are Great Britain, Germany, Spain and Canada, with Canada handled province by province. We do not write for markets where the products discussed are prohibited, and we do not target anyone under the legal gambling age.
2. What counts as evidence
- Search engine behavior: the search engine's own documentation, help pages and dated announcements. For Google, that means Google Search Central and Search Console Help.
- Standards: the standard itself, such as RFC 5646 (BCP 47) for language tags, and W3C Internationalization pages.
- Market rules: legislation, regulator pages and official registers, in the original language where possible.
- Secondary sources (law firm notes, trade press) only when no primary source is available, and always labeled as such on the page.
3. Dates and labels
Each source is listed with the date it showed when we checked it, or "no date shown". The header of every page carries the date of the last full source check. Where a rule has a future start date, the guide says so. Quotations are exact; translations of quotations are marked.
4. Local hreflang testing
The workbench checks hreflang syntax in the reader's browser against Google's documented format: ISO 639-1 language codes, ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region codes, x-default and fully qualified URLs. It also adds notes for the four markets we cover. It does not fetch URLs, so it cannot confirm return links, status codes, canonicals or the actual language of a page. Five regression cases from the project brief run on the page and in our build tests.
5. Search observations
When a guide describes what search results look like, it is a manual observation with recorded settings (country, language, device and date) and is labeled as such. We do not publish rankings, traffic estimates, visibility scores or search volumes. Where a template shows a volume column, the value is NOT MEASURED.
6. Examples
Examples use the reserved domains example.com and example.es, or are labeled illustrative. No example represents a real operator's site or data.
7. Limits
- The guides explain search behavior and published rules. They are not legal advice; licenses carry conditions that only the operator and its counsel can confirm.
- Regulators change rules often. A guide is accurate as of its sources' dates.
- Some regulator pages could not be read directly during research. Where that happened, the guide relies on the law's text or labels the source.
8. Review cycle
We recheck sources every quarter and whenever Google or a regulator announces a relevant change. Substantial changes update a page's "Updated" date and, for corrections, add a note (see the corrections policy).