hreflang Explained: How to Set Up Multilingual and Multi-Country SEO Correctly

Short answer: hreflang is a set of tags that tells search engines which language or country version of a page to show each visitor. Every version must list all the versions, including itself, and each must point back to the others, or the tags are ignored.

What do the tags look like?

For an English page with a Hindi version, the head of both pages contains the same three lines: a link rel=alternate with hreflang=en and the English URL, one with hreflang=hi and the Hindi URL, and one with hreflang=x-default pointing at the fallback.

Which codes do you use?

• Language: ISO 639-1 codes such as en, hi, gu, es, fr.
• Language and region: add an ISO 3166-1 region, such as en-gb or pt-br.
• Use hyphens, not underscores, and do not invent codes like 'english' or 'en-uk'.

What goes wrong most often?

1. 1.No return link: the Hindi page does not list the English page back.
2. 2.Wrong or made-up codes.
3. 3.Alternate URLs that redirect, return errors or are blocked by robots.txt.
4. 4.A canonical tag pointing at a different language version.
5. 5.Translating body text but leaving titles, descriptions and structured data in the original language.
6. 6.One URL that swaps languages with a script, so there is nothing separate to index.

A simple setup that works

1. 1.Give each language its own URL, for example /en, /hi and the default for Gujarati.
2. 2.Add a self-referencing canonical to each page.
3. 3.Add the full hreflang set, with x-default, to every version.
4. 4.Link between versions with a real language switcher.
5. 5.List every version in your sitemap.