When you're creating content for multiple regions or in multiple languages, you'll want to let search engines know about each of those versions. One of the best ways to help search engines understand the relationships between your translated content is to use the hreflang attribute. These language annotations are the means for you to provide a strong recommendation to search engines about what language and region the content is intended to serve. Basically, these tags will tell a search engine where each internationalized version of the page lives by specifying each of the URLs along with the language and country targets.
While these make a lot of sense and can be a fantastic indicator for search engines, you should note that language annotations are not currently supported by all search engines.Google and Yandex are among those that already support these. But if you're optimizing for specific search engines, you'll want to do some research into whether or not they take the hreflang attribute into consideration. Also keep in mind that major search engines are constantly evolving. So just because it's not supported today doesn't mean it's not on the roadmap for tomorrow.
Let's have a look at how these language annotations actually work. Let's say you have one version of your About Us page in English and another in French. You can put these two tags on both pages specifying which URLs house each piece of content. For instance, if you've translated a page into 12 different languages, they'll all need to be included here. Remember, the purpose here is to make sure that search engines know about all of your language and regional targeting. So no matter which version a search engine sees, you need to expose every version to them every time.
This is one of those things that's very easy to trip over. If your French version links to your English version, you'll need to ensure your English version links back to your French version.As we discussed earlier in the course, you'll also want to add the x-default value if you're not targeting any specific language or region. For sites that are multilingual and multiregional, you can be more specific by adding country targets as well. If you had a website that included one version of the page targeted to French-speaking Canadians, for example, you could modify this tag to include both the language and the country code.
Canadian English has a few differences from American English, or even English spoken in the UK or New Zealand. So let's pretend that your strategy included a country-specific page for English speakers in Canada, but for the rest of the English speakers in the world, you'll just default to a single language target. In this example, you could set a general English hreflang attribute as the default English page for anyone outside of Canada, and call out the English-Canada combination separately. When adding the language code to your annotations, you're required to use an abbreviated format called the ISO 639-1 format.
This is a standard that classifies and abbreviates all known languages. A really good source to grab the abbreviated codes from is actually Wikipedia. For multiregional content you can add on the abbreviated country codes, which will help search engines understand what region the translated content belongs to. The standard for country code abbreviations is ISO 3166-1 alpha-2. Again, you can find this at Wikipedia. It's worthwhile to note that while we've just seenthat you can have a lone language code, you cannot just provide a country code by itself in an hreflang annotation.
When you've mapped the related content to its equivalent on other language and country combinations, you'll need to decide if the results will be placed on the web page before the closing head tag in an XML site map, or for cases where you're using non-HTML files, in an HTTP header. Using the site map option means less on-page coding to worry about, but it will take some organization and planning. Following our earlier example, a site map that tells search engines an English About Us page has an equivalent version for French-speaking Canadians and English-speaking Canadians, and a version that's for English speakers anywhere else, we could update our XML file to look something like this.
Of course, you'd need equivalent entries and URL elements for each and every page of your translated content. A good practice is to validate your site map in order to identify any usage or syntax errors. Many content management systems or backend systems will be able to help you automate the building and submission of these site maps. If you followed the SEO Fundamentals course, this is a great reminder not to forget site maps best practices. One tool you might want to use to test your site map is the flang testing tool from dejanseo.
The last method for inserting hreflang annotations is through an HTTP header. These are typically used for non-HTML files, like PDF files, for example. Here's a quick example of what this component might look like when sent to a browser. For the Google search engine, once their crawlers have detected your hreflang annotations, you'll be able to check on them in Webmaster Tools. You can view the number of hreflang tags Google has discovered along with any errors encountered. Have a look at the Language tab under Search Traffic, International Targeting.
When all is said and done, using the hreflang functionality will give search engines explicit clarity around the language or country you're targeting. This provides them with the ability to identify and select the most relevant content for your target visitor.
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