I always find it interesting to share SEO questions submitted by huge brands and online properties. So when Shirin Oskooi, who I believes works at Yahoo currently but did work at Google and Microsoft asked a question on why Google was not picking up the international versions of Yahoo Answers properly, I became interested.

Shirin Oskooi said, “Google is sending all international traffic to the US version of Yahoo Answers as of September.” She wanted to know why and Google’s John Mueller said because the site is not using hreflang markup. That and Yahoo Answers USA undergoing a complete revamp, caused Google to confuse it all.

Shirin Oskooi added:

Google’s John Mueller explained:

So I guess between the new Yahoo Answers site, Google crawling it and not seeing the hreflang markup – it got confused.

Forum discussion at Google Webmaster Help.