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View Full Version : What is hreflang? And should you be using it in your SEO?



Harold Mansfield
04-07-2016, 10:32 AM
I know a lot of people over the years have struggled with having multiple sites with similar content. hreflang is not for multiple sites with the same content..such as MFA's or spam sites. It's for multiple language or different geo targeting sites.


What is hreflang?
hreflang is a technical SEO solution for sites that have similar content in multiple languages. A site owner wants search engines to point people to the most “fitting” language. Say a user is Dutch, the page that ranks is English, but there’s also a Dutch version. You would want Google to show the Dutch page in the search results for that user. This is the type of problem hreflang was designed to solve.

Yoast wrote a pretty detailed article on what hreflang is and how it works here:
https://yoast.com/hreflang-ultimate-guide/

vangogh
04-07-2016, 10:49 AM
That is a good guide. I subscribe to the site, but passed the article as I only publish in one language. I took a look now that you posted and it's definitely worth looking through. I usually set language attributes directly on the html tag. I wonder if that does the same thing. I'll have to dig through the article more.

KristineS
04-07-2016, 12:29 PM
I didn't even know this existed. Very useful tool, it sounds like. Definitely something to mention to our IT guys here.