Hreflang - The Absolute Guide for Begginers

If your website has content in multiple languages and is targeting multiple regions or countries, then you must understand and use the hreflang attribute. In this post, we’ll cover everything from the basic concept to implementation and troubleshooting common issues.

Hreflang is a simple HTML attribute, but it can be challenging to fully understand.

Google’s John Mueller described hreflang as “one of the most complex aspects of SEO” because it gets “really hard quickly.”

When Ahrefs, a platform that is essential for marketers, ran a study on hreflang across 374,756 domains, it found that 67% of the implementations had issues. Here are the most common ones:

But don’t let that put you off. Hreflang isn’t that complicated to understand, and you can automate it to a large extent. (We’ll talk about that later on.) Here’s everything you’ll learn in this guide:

Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. It is as simple as that. If you have multiple versions of the same page in different languages, you can use the hreflang tag to tell search engines like Google about these variations. This helps them to serve the correct version to their users.

For example, if we Google “Microsoft” from Germany, this is the first result:

If we do the same in Greece, we see this version of the page: