hreflang

The hreflang attributehreflang is an HTML attribute that tells search engines the language and region of a page. It links language or regional variants of the same content to one another.Open glossary entry → signals to search engines which language and region a page is intended for, and connects equivalent language or country versions of a page. This lets Google serve users the appropriate variant, for example a German page for Switzerland instead of an English version.

hreflang is specified as an annotation in HyperText Markup Language (HTML)HyperText Markup Language (HTML) is the markup language for web pages. It defines the structure and content of a page, such as headings, paragraphs, links and images.Open glossary entry →, the markup language for web pages, or in the XML sitemapAn XML sitemap is a machine-readable file listing a website's important URLs. It helps search engines discover content more efficiently but does not replace internal linking or guarantee indexing.Open glossary entry →. Each variant should reference all the others and point back to itself.

• de-ch for German in Switzerland,
• fr-ch for French in Switzerland,
• en for a language-general English version.

Correctly set hreflang annotations help avoid duplicate contentDuplicate content refers to identical or very similar content reachable under several URLs. It rarely triggers a penalty but causes a loss of control over which version becomes the main one.Open glossary entry → across language versions and show the right page in the appropriate search results. Faulty or one-sided annotations, by contrast, can cause confusion in how pages are matched.