How to use Magento 2 hreflang attribute for SEO?

Hreflang attribute is an HTML meta element that helps search engines extract data in the language the website is writing. And thanks to the declaration of this language, Google can help the ranking of the website higher. It also helps Google show a suggestion to translate to the native language if your website has a different language than the visitor.

Hreflang attribute is a method to mark up pages that have similar content in multiple languages. It helps search engine spiders can understand how to handle multilingual or multi-region websites. To automatically set up these hreflang attribute, feel free to checkout out our Magento 2 SEO module

Hreflang attribute Code sample

When to use Hreflang attribute

Hreflang attribute is used in multilingual and multi-regional environments. It’s multi-lingual declaration for the site. Hreflang attribute is used to resolve the following issues:

• Duplication content because of targeting different markets with the same language
• Duplication content because of targeting different markets with different languages
• Targeting issues owing to targeting a country market with different languages
• Wrong specific data (e.g. prices, currency or date formats)

Hence, you should use Hreflang attribute to avoid duplicate content as well as the small issues to help your site rank higher on SERPs and increase the traffics.

How to use Hreflang attribute

Hreflang attribute can be used in multilingual and multi-region site environments. There are three ways to implement:

• HTML head
• HTTP header
• XML sitemaps

Here is an example for using Hreflang attribute:

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="en" />

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-gb/" hreflang="en-gb"/>

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-au/" hreflang="en-au"/>

Some benefits of Hreflang attribute

From an SEO point of view, there are three main reasons why you should implement Hreflang attribute.

Boost the site ranking

In fact, Hreflang attribute is not really useful to increase the site traffic but it helps to improve the site ranking on the SERPs. Basing on the search’s location, the search engines can display the content in the specific language searching.

Avoid duplicate content

You maybe have the same content in different URLs to different users. There are some extremely small mistakes on these pages such as the prices, address, etc. However, the search engines, for example, Google, can not understand and they consider that content is duplicated. Thanks to the Hreflang attribute, the search engines can understand these contents clearly and from that, prevent the bad results for pages.

Improve the user experiences

Hreflang attribute is the most effective solution to create the different content for different customers. Using Hreflang attribute also brings the wonderful experiences for the shoppers in process of shopping. That is so great for both audiences and webmasters.

Conclusion

Hreflang attribute is a problem that many people are facing. So check back if you’re working on your implementation. Make sure everything with your site is convenient and your customers are comfortable with your site. If you don’t know how to configure hreflang tags yet, read this post for more imformation.

With Mageplaza SEO extension, all problems can resolve. We work hard to release one of the best technical solutions is using the Hreflang attribute. This feature now is available in Mageplaza SEO extension and is included in the Ultimate package.