Mastering the hreflang attribute is one way to ensure your site performs optimally in search engines if your website offers content in multiple languages. That’s why this comprehensive guide covers everything from the hreflang basics to troubleshooting, ensuring your multilingual content reaches the right audience.
While hreflang may be a simple-sounding HTML attribute, it ends up being a rather complex implementation. Google’s John Mueller once even called hreflang “one of the most complex aspects of SEO.”
But don’t worry: this is how you can simplify hreflang implementation. And with the right strategies, you can automate much of the process.
What You’ll Learn in This Guide
- What the hreflang attribute is
- Why hreflang is important for SEO
- How hreflang tags are structured
- Step-by-step implementation of hreflang
- Automating hreflang implementation
- Troubleshooting hreflang issues
- Common pitfalls and Google’s handling of errors
What Is Hreflang?
Hreflang is an HTML attribute to indicate language and geographical targeting of web pages to the search engine. This is especially useful if you have several versions of the same content for different languages or regions.
Example:
- A search for “Apple official website” in the US results in: apple.com/us
- The same search in Spain results in: apple.com/es
That is made possible by hreflang.
Why Hreflang Matters for SEO
Using hreflang enables the search engines to serve the right version of your content to the right user in their native language, or in the appropriate region. Here’s why that matters:
- Improved User Experience: Users are likely to interact positively with your site if they are being shown content in their native language or related to their region.
- Signals of Ranking Shared: Google has told us that the pages within an hreflang cluster share ranking signals. So even if a page is the “best match,” it can borrow from the strength of related pages in that cluster to help it rank better.
- Avoiding Duplicate Content Issues: Without hreflang, Google may consider similar pages, such as US and UK English versions, as duplicate content and might then index only one of those versions. Hreflang tags clarify the relationship between such pages, reducing the risk of duplicate content penalties.
What Does a Hreflang Tag Look Like?
The basic syntax looks something like this for hreflang tags:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x" href="https://example.com/page" />Here’s what each part means:
rel=”alternate”: It indicates an alternate version of the page.
hreflang=”x”: It points to the language, and optionally the region.
href=”URL”: It points to the URL of the alternate version.
Example for English and German versions:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de" />You can identify the language using two-letter ISO 639-1 codes:
English: en
German: de
Example :
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de" />Adding Regional Targeting
To target specific regions, add a two-letter ISO 3166-1 country code:
- English in the US: en-us
- English in the UK: en-gb
Example:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://example.com/us" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://example.com/uk" />Basic Rules of Hreflang Implementation
Rule #1: Hreflang Tags Must Go Both Ways
If Page A links to Page B in its hreflang tag, Page B needs to link back to Page A. This is how the relationship is crawled and verified by search engines.
Rule #2: Self-Referential Tags Are Required
Every page needs to provide self-referential tags in the hreflang tags:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en" />Rule #3: X-Default for Catch-All/Fallback Pages
The x-default tag identifies a fallback page when no other variation matches the user’s language or location:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />How to Implement Hreflang
- HTML Tags
Use hreflang tags in the section of your pages directly.
Example:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de" /> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />2. HTTP Headers
For non-HTML files, such as PDFs, use HTTP headers:
Link: https://example.com/en; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”en”
Link: https://example.com/de; rel=”alternate”; hreflang=”de”
3. XML Sitemaps
Make sure to include hreflang annotations in your sitemap to ease management:
<url>
<loc>https://example.com/en</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />
</url>Automating Hreflang Implementation
Managing hreflang tags manually can be tedious for large websites. Automate the process using tools like Google Sheets for generating XML sitemaps. Steps:
- Input your URLs into a template.
- Add language and region codes.
- Export the sitemap with hreflang annotations.
Troubleshooting Hreflang Issues
Even when adhering to best practices, hreflang implementation can still present challenges. In my opinion, being proactive in identifying and addressing potential problems is essential for maintaining a seamless multilingual SEO strategy. From my experience, thorough auditing of hreflang tags helps mitigate these issues effectively. For instance, tools such as Ahrefs’ Site Audit are invaluable for pinpointing and resolving common concerns, such as:
- Broken reciprocal tags: Hreflang annotations should always point reciprocally, meaning each tag should direct traffic both ways between language versions. If the connection is incomplete, it can lead to confusion for search engines and misdirected traffic.
- Incorrect language codes: Only ISO-compliant language and region codes should be used. Non-standard codes might cause search engines to misinterpret the intended audience for a webpage.
- Broken links: Any hreflang tags that point to non-existent pages, such as 404 errors, must be promptly removed or replaced. Leaving these unresolved could harm user experience and SEO performance.
By regularly auditing and maintaining hreflang tags, we can address these issues before they escalate, ensuring that our multilingual SEO efforts remain effective and aligned with search engine expectations.
Common Hreflang Issues Search Engines like Google May Ignore
As far as I’m concerned, Google and other search engines show a great deal of indulgence regarding the minor hreflang errors. Even though such mistakes do not seem to interfere much with one’s search engine optimization efforts, it is still best that one strives to eliminate such errors where possible for maximum effectiveness. Google most of the times ignores:
- Misplacing hyphens for underscores: For instance, It does seem that ”en_UK” which is deviant from “en-GB” may still satisfy all necessary implementation criteria. That said, it is always wise to follow all recommendations intended to make it consistent and eliminate potential problems.
- Omission of self-refs: Self-referencing hreflang tags are not mandatory but it is fair to say that it is best to include them due to self-reference hreflang tags. This assists search engines in understanding the purpose of the page better and confirms the definitive version which the page is intended to represent.
- Incorporating relative URLs: The ideal practice is to use absolute URLs for hreflang tags but in most cases, Google gets relative URLs right. And still, I fully understand the extent to which this practice is still followed but I strongly recommend using absolute URLs to avoid confusion and ensure consistent practices in the embedding of the tags.
Even though these points appear basic, addressing them will go a long way in improving the accuracy and effectiveness of hreflang tags and contribute greatly towards the effective management of multilingual SEO.
Avoid Automatic Redirection
Google suggests not using any automatic redirects depending on users’ locations or browsers’ languages to avoid confusing crawlers. Instead, show a banner indicating the right version.
Conclusion
There’s no need to find implementing hreflang daunting. Keep organized, automate where you can, and audit for errors on a regular basis for better management of multilingual content and improved visibility in global search results.