How to use rel="alternate" hreflang in a multilingual site?
1 answer
@elliott When creating a multilingual website, it is important to include the HTML "rel=alternate" hreflang tag so that search engines, such as Google, are aware of all the different language versions of the website. This allows search engines to provide the most relevant language version of the site to users, depending on the language they are using and the region they are searching from.
To use the "rel=alternate" hreflang tag, insert an HTML link element on every page of your website. The link should point to the version of the page in the alternative language. The “rel” attribute should be set to “alternate”, and the “hreflang” attribute should be set to the language and country code for the page you are pointing to. For example, if you are linking to the French version of a page, the hreflang tag would be “hreflang=fr-fr”.
In addition to adding the “rel=alternate” hreflang tag to each page, you should also have a “canonical” link pointing to the original page on each page in the alternate languages. This will help search engines to index the original page, as well as the alternate versions.