What Are The Most Common Hreflang Mistakes?

This week’s Ask An SEO question comes from a reader facing a common challenge when setting up international websites:

“I’m expanding into international markets but I’m confused about hreflang implementation. My rankings are inconsistent across different countries, and I think users are seeing the wrong language versions. What are the most common hreflang mistakes, and how do I audit my international setup?”

This is a great question and an important one for anyone working on websites that cover multiple countries or languages.

The hreflang tag is an HTML attribute that is used to indicate to search engines what language and/or geographical targeting your webpages are intended for. It’s useful for websites that have multiple versions of a page for different languages or regions.

For example, you may have a page dedicated to selling a product to a U.S. audience, and a different one about the same product targeted at a UK audience. Although both these pages would be in English, they may have differences in the terminology used, pricing, and delivery options.

It would be important for the search engines to show the U.S. page in the SERPs for audiences in the US, and the UK page to audiences in the UK. The hreflang tag is used to help the search engines understand the international targeting of those pages.

How To Use An Hreflang Tag

The hreflang tag comprises the “rel=” alternate code, which indicates the page is part of a set of alternates. The “href=” attribute, which tells the search engines the original page, and the “hreflang=” attribute, which details the country and or language the page is targeted to.

It’s important to remember that hreflang tags should be:

• Self-referencing: Each page that has an hreflang tag should also include a reference to itself as part of the hreflang implementation.
• Bi-directional: Each page that has an hreflang tag on it should also be included in the hreflang tags of the pages it references, so Page A references itself and Page B, with Page B referencing itself and Page A.
• Set up in either the XML sitemaps of the sites, or HTML/HTTP headers of the pages: Make sure that you are not only formatting your hreflang tags correctly, but placing them in the code where the search engines will look for them. This means putting them in your XML sitemaps, or in your HTML head (or in the HTTP header of documents like PDFs).

An example of hreflang implementation for the U.S. product page mentioned above would look like:

Each page includes a self-referencing canonical tag, which hints to search engines that this is the right URL to index for its specific region.

Common Mistakes

Although in theory, hreflang tags should be simple to set up, they are also easy to get wrong. It’s also important to remember that hreflang tags are considered hints, not directives. They are one signal, among several, that helps the search engines determine the relevance of the…