What is hreflang and why is it important

Hreflang is a standard set by Google which helps Google target the correct content on your website to international users. Google tries it's best to discern the correct page to serve a user but sometimes you'll have similar pages in the same language and it may struggle to determine which one is the most appropriate. This may result in Google serving your page targeted at the German market to a user speaking German in Austria. Hreflang is designed to solve that by allowing you to specify the page you'd like Google to return in each market, helping alleviate the guess work!

When is hreflang useful

Hreflang is especially useful in instances where a country has more than one language, e.g. Switzerland which has three official languages. Hreflang allows you to target three versions of your website to German, French and Italian users in Switzerland.

Looking at another example Portuguese is spoken all over the world. Portuguese users in Brazil should be shown their local websites information. With hreflang you can ensure Google is told which version of your Portuguese sites is most suitable for a Brazilian user.

What happens if hreflang is wrong

Incorrect hreflang often causes Google to ignore your mark-up and therefore potentially not return the correct result to users searching for your product. It’s therefore important you test the implementation regularly to ensure everything is working as expected.

Why it’s important to check your hreflang tags

Hreflang is in practice hard to implement, this is because often international websites will be operating across different systems and have unique quirks that may make the logic of implementation harder. Hreflang is very dependant on the chain of references always being in tact, as soon as one reference is broken it can invalidate the entire logic. So it’s important to make sure your pages don’t have any errors.

How do you use this tool

On hreflangtest.com you can test the hreflang implementation if it appears on page (in the page header or HTTP header) and use our hreflang sitemap testing tool if your hreflang tags are in your sitemap.