SEO glossary
hreflang
hreflang is an annotation that tells search engines which language and region a page is written for, and which other URLs are its equivalents in other languages.
It does not decide rankings; it decides which version is shown to whom. Done right, a Spanish searcher gets your Spanish page instead of your English one, and the two stop being treated as duplicates competing with each other.
The rule that breaks most implementations is reciprocity. Every page in a set must point at every other page in the set, including itself, and if page A claims B without B claiming A, Google discards the whole cluster. Add a x-default for the version that serves anyone the set does not cover.
Get the codes right: language is ISO 639-1, region is ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2, and region on its own is invalid — en-GB is fine, GB is not. The common error is using a country code where a language belongs, which silently annotates nothing.
Common question
- Is hreflang a ranking factor?
- No. It affects which language version is served to which searcher, and stops your own translations competing with each other.
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