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
Following the best practices doesn’t rule out problems completely. Tools such as Ahrefs’ Site Audit help with identifying and fixing issues including:
- Broken reciprocal tags: They should point both ways.
- Incorrect language codes: Use only ISO-compliant codes.
- Broken links: Remove or replace hreflang annotations that point to 404 pages.
Common Hreflang Issues Search Engines like Google May Ignore
Google is often lenient toward minor mistakes, including:
- Using underscores instead of dashes, e.g., en_UK instead of en-GB.
- Lack of self-references, although this is still a good practice.
- Usage of relative URLs instead of absolute ones.
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.