What is hreflang?
Hreflang is an HTML tag that can be inserted into the source code of your website, through which you can inform search engines about any language versions of the particular page you are on.
These annotations help search engines serve the correct language variant in the given SERP. In other words, this prevents an English language variant of your page from being served in, for example, a Danish search, if a Danish version of that page is available.
How do you create hreflang tag annotations?
Depending on your CMS, there may be modules/plugins available that can create hreflang tag annotations on your website. However, it is important that you ensure these are implemented correctly. If you are somewhat technically proficient, you can also implement hreflang tags directly in your website's source code by adding them to your theme files.
But how do you create these hreflang annotations correctly?
Correct hreflang tag annotation
If we take the URL www.eksempel.com/en/produktside as our example — which is an English language variant of the given page — and there are a further 3 language variants of this page in Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, then the hreflang annotations on the page should be set up as follows:
- <link rel="alternate" href="https://eksempel.com/en/produktside" hreflang="en-gb" />
- <link rel="alternate" href="https://eksempel.com/sv/produktside" hreflang="sv-se" />
- <link rel="alternate" href="https://eksempel.com/da/produktside" hreflang="da-dk" />
- <link rel="alternate" href="https://eksempel.com/no/produktside" hreflang="no-no" />
You can use this tool to create your hreflang annotations: https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/
Do you need help implementing correct hreflang tags and ensuring your language versions appear correctly in search engines?
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