If you’re aiming to global with your business, the day will come when you’ll have to start thinking about your geotargeting strategy and a new domain structure. That process involves not only great deal of strategic thinking, but also a lot of technicalities to take care of. And while choosing the best domain strategy and diving deep into the waters of technical SEO, you’ll inevitably encounter hreflang.
Wait, href-what?
Hreflang (also known as link rel alternate) is a html tag attribute introduced by Google in 2011. Simply speaking, it explains Google what the relationship is between your pages in different languages on your website, so that an appropriate version of your website is offered to a user searching in a particular language in the search results. It basically says “if a person looks for results in a specific language (e.g. Russian), this page is more likely to offer what they look for than a page with similar content in a different language (German).
In practice, the hreflang looks something like this:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-us” />
Such a tag tells Google that “this is the page for English speaking visitors from the US”. If you wanted to target with one page both English and Spanish speaking visitors from the US, the hreflang would look something like this:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”en-us” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com” hreflang=”es-us” />
A specific role belongs to the x-default hreflang tag. The x-default says “hey, Google, unless there is a specific version of my site defined in my hreflang, please show this one to the visitor”. In other words, it defines the page that should see all the people that have no specific version defined for them. The final version of your hreflang could perhaps look like this:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/es” hreflang=”es” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/de” hreflang=”de” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />
It’s a tag, not a ring of power
So I just set my hreflangs right and I’m all ‘geotargeted’, right? Thinking that would be a huge mistake, yet we can see many people relying on the power of hreflang and neglecting working on their local signals. One thing needs to be set up straight: hreflang is a directive, not a signal. What does that mean?
It means that hreflang itself isn’t evaluated by Google as one of the local signals. And by that logic, it can eventually be outweighed by lack of local signals. So never stop working on a good backlinking portfolio, high-quality localized content and usage of the right multilingual keywords. Or, in case that sounds a bit overwhelming, give us a tuck and we’ll get it done.
