Glossary · Technical
hreflang
Definition. hreflang is an annotation telling search engines which language and regional version of a page to show which audience. It is how multi-market sites avoid the wrong locale ranking in the wrong country.
Annotations must be reciprocal: if page A points to page B, page B must point back. Missing return links are the most common implementation error, and they silently disable the whole set.
Include a self-referencing tag and an x-default for users whose language or region you have not covered.
hreflang resolves regional duplication, not translation quality. Machine-translated pages that read as translation still perform badly, correctly annotated or not.
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Related terms
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is substantially identical content available at more than one URL, on your own site or…
Canonical URL
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More in Technical: Internal linking · Anchor text · Orphan page · Crawl budget · Indexation · Canonical URL · Duplicate content · Keyword cannibalization
Frequently asked questions
What does hreflang mean?
hreflang is an annotation telling search engines which language and regional version of a page to show which audience. It is how multi-market sites avoid the wrong locale ranking in the wrong country.
Why does hreflang matter for AI SEO?
Annotations must be reciprocal: if page A points to page B, page B must point back. Missing return links are the most common implementation error, and they silently disable the whole set.
What is the most common mistake with hreflang?
hreflang resolves regional duplication, not translation quality. Machine-translated pages that read as translation still perform badly, correctly annotated or not.
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