Book a demo

Hreflang: What it is, how to optimize it and what mistakes to avoid

Any international SEO strategy should rely on hreflang as it helps target an international audience with more accuracy.

However, hreflang can be a tricky subject for some SEOs as it can be difficult to use the annotations and to get them implemented correctly on geo-targeted websites. Let’s take a closer look at what you need to know to implement hreflang, optimize it and the mistakes you should avoid.

What is hreflang and how does it work?

Before we can understand how it works, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page regarding what hreflang actually is. Simply put, hreflang is an HTML attribute that helps Google decide which page should be shown, and who to show it to.

Hreflang annotations aim to cross-reference pages that are similar in content, but target different audiences according to their language and/or country. It ensures that the correct content and pages will be shown to the right users when they enter a query in the version of Google search that you are targeting.

The example below shows the hreflang tags that target French speakers in France and French speakers in Canada:

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr-fr” href=”http://www.example.com/fr/” />

<link rel=”alternate” hreflang=”fr-ca” href=”http://www.example.com/fr-ca/” />

Both of these tags would appear on both pages. This would ensure that Canadians searching on google.ca would find the page targeting Canadians, and French people searching on google.fr would find the page targeting the French.

Why hreflang matters in SEO

Hreflang tags help send a strong signal to Google that one page is a translation or localization of another, which in turn helps boost the ranking of new translations.

Hreflang tags are a key element to an internationalized website and thus your international SEO. It can also be useful in regards to sharing the quality, relevance, and authority signals across multiple language versions of your site.
[oc-redirect num=1]

How to construct a hreflang tag: 3 methods

Now we know what it is, let’s look at how to set it up. Setting up your hreflang requires the language and country code and it needs to reference all pages that serve as alternates. You can take a look at our e-book that walks you through the entire process.

There are three ways to implement your hreflang tags that we will detail below.

During a crawl with the Oncrawl app, we can collect and analyze the hreflang declarations that tell search engines which language the page is written in, and which other languages are available.

1. HTML hreflang declarations in the page <head>

Similarly to canonical tags, hreflang tags take the following form:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.yoursite.com/your_translated_page" />

2. Hreflang declarations in the page’s HTTP headers

This method is particularly useful if your page is a file in a format other than HTML, such as an image or a PDF.

These declarations look like this:

Link: <https://www.yoursite.com/your_original_page>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="en", <https://www.yoursite.com/your_translated_page>

3. Hreflang declarations in sitemaps

By declaring hreflang references in sitemaps, you are able to keep all of your references in a single place. However, this also means you need to keep your sitemaps updated when you add translations or localizations.

Sitemaps declarations add an <xhtml:link> tag and its properties to the listing for each page with hreflang translations:

<url>
<loc>https://www.yoursite.com/your_original_page</loc>
<xhtml:link
rel="alternate"
hreflang="en"
href="https://www.yoursite.com/your_translated_page"/>
</url>

If you use this method for your hreflang declarations, you may want check the following option in your crawl settings:

Expand the Sitemaps section of the crawl settings.

Sitemaps Oncrawl app

You may also want to tick the Allow soft mode box. This ensures that we’ll analyze sitemaps regardless of whether you follow the rules of the sitemap’s protocol. Many sites ignore these rules with regard to where they place sitemaps. This way, you do not need to specify sitemap URLs.

Optimizing hreflang use

Hreflang tags, regardless of the method you choose to implement them, have consistent and important elements to respect. Otherwise, you risk them being ignored by search engines and worse, your intended audience won’t be able to find them.

Setting up your crawl for hreflang analysis

Hreflang data is automatically included in every crawl, so you don’t have to do anything special.

If your site is translated or localized and you want to analyze complete hreflang data, the only thing you need to do is to make sure that all pages of the site are crawled, no matter what language they’re in.

Let’s say your site has translations in different directories, such as https://www.yoursite.com/es and https://www.yoursite.com/en:

 

If, however, your site has translations in different subdomains, such as https://es.yoursite.com and https://en.yoursite.com, then you’ll need to consider the following things:

 

Finally, let’s look at the scenario where your site has translations on different domains, such as https://www.mysite.es and https://www.mysite.co.uk

Available hreflang data

As with all of our data, you can click through to the Data Explorer to view the hreflang URLs, languages, specific issues, and page clusters for each URL.

Available hreflang data

Additional hreflang columns can also be added to any Data Explorer results including:

Hreflang page clusters

On any page, hreflang declarations list all of the equivalent pages for other languages or regions. Together, these pages form a cluster.

When hreflangs are correctly implemented, each page in a cluster will have an hreflang reference to every other page in the cluster, including a reference to itself. Below is an example of a simplified ideal cluster:

Perfect hreflang cluster

All pages that are referenced as hreflangs should be canonical and indexable pages.

However, it often happens that some of the links within a cluster are missing or incorrect, producing clusters with errors.

hreflang cluster with missing links

How to identify and explore hreflang page clusters in Oncrawl

It’s pretty simple to identify and explore hreflang page clusters using the Oncrawl Data Explorer. Each cluster is assigned a unique ID and to view the pages in the cluster for a specific URL, you can use the following shortcut for the Oncrawl Query language filter:

Finding hreflang data in Oncrawl

You can easily check whether you’ve added the correct language alternates on all of the necessary pages.

Pages with hreflang

Identifying hreflang issues

There are two main charts in the app that we recommend looking at to identify hreflang issues on your site: the hreflang issues chart and the non-indexable pages declared as hreflang chart.

Both can be found in the default dashboard under Crawl report > Indexability > Rel alternate.

Identifying hreflang issues

Certain issues may prevent Google from taking your hreflang declarations into account such as:

Missing declarations

[oc-redirect num=2]
Missing self declaration

 

Duplicate hreflang declarations

 

Conflicting x-default declarations

 

Incorrect language code

 

Non-indexable pages declared as hreflang

Top tips for implementing hreflang

In order to prevent Google from treating your translations as duplicate content, it is especially important to indicate translations of pages when content may look very similar to a search engine. This may be the case in the following examples:

When using hreflang tags, here are some top tips to help you optimize your pages and the mistakes you should avoid.

Make sure that links are reciprocal

A problem with reciprocal links means that hreflang annotations don’t cross-reference each other. You can see these errors within your Google Search Console under the International Targeting tab.

A key rule you need to keep in mind is that your annotations must be confirmed from the other pages. For instance, if page A links to page B, page B needs to link back to page A to avoid misunderstanding from search engines. Page A should use rel-alternate-hreflang annotation linking to itself to work correctly. Non-reciprocal links are ignored by Google.

Use the correct URL format

List the URL in the correct format: “https://www.yoursite.com/your_page“. Don’t skip the “https://”!

The hreflang=”x-default” is an option

Use the optional value hreflang=”x-default” for language selection pages or for pages that automatically redirect to the user’s language.

Create a generic language page

Indicate a generic language page, such as “en”, if you have a series of regional pages in that language (“en-US”, “en-GB”, “en-CA”, “en-ZA”, “en-AU”). This page will be used for all regions you didn’t specify. In this example, that might include English-speaking New Zealand, or even a user browsing in English from France.

Use the correct country or language codes

Using hreflang implies targeting the right country or language, so be sure to add the right codes to your webpages. Google explains that,

“The value of the hreflang attribute must be in ISO 639-1 format for the language, and in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for the region. Specifying only the region is not supported.”

Some studies show Google recognizes certain errors and corrects for them; others show the opposite. It’s easiest to err on the side of caution and use the correct codes.

If the targeted language uses multiple scripts, you can also choose to specify the script. For example, to indicate a page in the Simplified Chinese script for users in Taiwan, you can use the code: zh-Hans-TW

Until recently, Google required you to list all available translations of a page. This practice is still strongly encouraged. However, even if you can’t list all translations of the page, you must include reciprocal rel=”alternate” links between each translated page and the page in the main or original language of your site.

Avoid adding hreflang tags to no-indexed pages

Google reports hreflang tags as an error if they point to noindex pages, either they are with a meta-robots noindex tag or blocked in robots.txt

Google will not be able to follow the return link from that blocked page back to the originating link, so it will report a return tag error. Please note that only pages that are blocked will stop working, not all your hreflang tags in a page group.

Choose the one method you want to use: don’t mix page tagging methods and hreflang sitemaps methods

Combining methods to implement hreflang is counterproductive. Here are some points to keep in mind when deciding whether to use the xml sitemaps or page tagging methods:

Don’t use hreflang to try to resolve duplicate content issues

Some SEO myths keep saying that implementing hreflang tags will help fix duplicate content problems. Actually, for similar content, adding hreflang tags to your site will help Google recognize and understand the country and language’s target of your page, but it won’t help search engines decide which version of content is the best for a query in the SERPs.

Let’s say you have two pages in the same language targeting different zones such as French in France and French in Belgium. The content of those two pages may be so similar that they are considered duplicates; adding hreflang tags will not help.

It is still possible that your French page may outrank your Belgium page, if the French page has more link authority, and especially if it has links from French-language sources.

Hreflang helps Google to understand your content, but to create an effective international marketing strategy, you need to include link building to your sites from the relevant countries/language you are targeting. This will subsequently help to leverage the value of your international versions.

Duplicate content is a serious, but separate issue, that should be treated separately.

Final thoughts

In conclusion, mastering hreflang implementation is a crucial aspect of any international SEO strategy and Oncrawl’s a great ally for international SEOs as it gives you a precise view of the state of your hreflang implementation.

Constructing hreflang tags may seem complicated, but whether through HTML declarations, HTTP headers, or sitemaps, the goal remains consistent—accurately signaling the relationships between pages targeting different languages and regions.

And although it is an important and powerful tool, hreflang is not the be-all, end-all when it comes to international SEO. A holistic international marketing strategy is imperative for sustained success.

As you navigate the multilingual and multicultural digital landscape, let hreflang be your compass, guiding users seamlessly to the content they seek, regardless of borders or languages.