rel="alternate" hreflang="x"
Help
Google serve the correct language or regional URL
Many websites serve
users from around the world, with content that's translated, or targeted to
users in a certain region. The rel="alternate" hreflang="x" annotations help Google serve the correct
language or regional URL to searchers. More information about
multi-regional and multilingual sites.
Some
example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended:
- You translate only the
template of your page, such as
the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language.
This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum
post.
- Your pages have broadly similar
content within a single language,
but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have
English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland.
- Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English
versions of each page.
Using rel="alternate"
hreflang="x"
Imagine
you have an English language page hosted at http://www.example.com/, with a
Spanish alternative at http://es.example.com/. You can indicate to Google that
the Spanish URL is the Spanish-language equivalent of the English page in one
of three ways:
- HTML
link element in header. In the
HTML <head> section of http://www.example.com/, add a link element pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage
at http://es.example.com/, like this:
<link
rel="alternate" hreflang="es"
href="http://es.example.com/" />
- HTTP
header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use
an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:
Link:
<http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate";
hreflang="es"
- Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language
version information in a Sitemap.
If
you have multiple language versions of a URL, each language page in the set
must userel="alternate"
hreflang="x" to identify all
language versions including itself. For example, if your site provides content
in French, English, and Spanish, the Spanish version must include arel="alternate"
hreflang="x" link for itself in
addition to links to the French and English versions. Similarly the English and
French versions must each include the same references to the French, English,
and Spanish versions.
If
you have several alternate URLs targeted at users with the same language but in
different locales, it's a good idea to provide a generic URL for geographically
unspecified users. For example, you may have specific URLs for English speakers
in Ireland (en-ie), Canada (en-ca), and Australia (en-au), but want all other English speakers to see your generic
English (en) page, and everyone else to see the homepage.
In this case you should specify the generic English-language (en) page for searchers in, say, the UK. You can
annotate this cluster of pages using a Sitemap file or using HTML link tags like this:
<link rel=”alternate”
href=”http://example.com/en-ie” hreflang=”en-ie” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-ca” hreflang=”en-ca” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-au” hreflang=”en-au” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en” hreflang=”en” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-ca” hreflang=”en-ca” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en-au” hreflang=”en-au” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/en” hreflang=”en” />
For language/country
selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the
hreflang value "x-default" as well:
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />
<link rel=”alternate” href=”http://example.com/” hreflang=”x-default” />
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