Week 8 – Hreflang Tags

It’s time for week 8 of the A to Z of #seo – which brings us on to:

HREFLANG 🎯

I’d say these are about the most complex aspect of SEO (beyond getting deep into code/techy stuff). So, what do they do and who needs them?

“If your website has content in multiple languages, then you must understand & use the hreflang attribute” (via Ahrefs guide – link will be in comments below)

…and it is an attribute that is added to a page (can be in other places actually, but mainly on a page) that denotes the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. For instance, Apple has a Spanish version of its site at /es/

This allows Google to show the right content (language) to the right person based on their locality or browser settings. Of course, this can help with conversions and so on, but it also helps with duplicate content – you have two versions of your page: one targets UK readers with British English spellings, & one targets US readers with American English spellings. These two pages are almost identical so Google may see them as duplicate content and choose one version to index.

These can get very messy, very quickly! The good news is, most sites don’t need them (i.e. you are targeting UK English on a .co.uk domain).

Guides from AHrefs & Yoast respectively &  – official Google docs here.

Finally, a great flowchart from the ‘Queen of Hreflang’ as I call her Aleyda Solis.