What is the hreflang attribute and why is it essential for a multilingual web...

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But what exactly is the hreflang attribute ? And how do I insert it into my site?First of all, since, as stated by John Mueller himself, hreflang is " one of the most complex aspects of SEO ", the advice is to rely on web marketing professionals .John Mueller's tweet that hreflang is one of the most complex aspects of SEOThe hreflang attribute is a small piece of HTML code that is placed in the head section of your web pages and tells Google the versions of a particular page in the various languages ​​of the site.


But hreflang goes even further, it allows you to distinguish and indicate to Special Data Google different versions of the same page not only based on the language, but also on the geographical area of ​​your user! How can it be useful to you?Think of having an e-commerce website targeting both American and English users: the language is the same, but the currency (dollars, pounds) is different. If hreflangs were not managed correctly, you would risk having your site opened by an American user in its version intended for the English market, therefore with prices in sterling, and that they would find themselves disoriented: your ability to convert would be significantly reduced, do not you think?How to check for hreflang on your multilingual siteHow do you know if your site has hreflang? Let's say you have a site in Italian and English. The first step to see if your site has hreflang errors is to go to Google's Search Console . All "insiders" know that in recent times the Search Console has undergone several changes due to the renewal of the platform, however currently the hreflang tag error report is found in International Targeting under the heading Tools and previous reports .International targeting section on search console, to see hreflang errorsSearch Console doesn't just tell us that there are problems, but also exactly what they are and which pages are affected. In fact, clicking on the type of error will open a further screen with the URLs affected by the critical issue in question .\






If, however, you want to test the correctness of hreflang on a site of which you do not have Search Console ownership, you can use the two tools suggested by Google itself in its article on hreflang , namely Technical SEO and Hreflang.ninja .hreflang Technical SEO testing toolhreflang test tool hreflang.ninjaHow to generate hreflang correctly: the hreflang generator by NetingIf you are already aware of errors on the alternate hreflang rel on your multilingual site and want to try your hand at redoing them, you can rely on the tool for automatic generation of the hreflang tag , developed directly by our team.hreflang generator by NetingSimply feed our tool the URLs of your website, specify which markets (language and possibly geographical area) it is aimed at and you will immediately obtain the necessary markup to insert in the head section of your pages. The tool also supports mass URL submissions via .txt and .csv file uploads.If, however, you prefer to leave the "dirty work" to web marketing professionals and be sure that Google always knows which version of your multilingual site to show to users, contact us for SEO consultancy and the hreflang tag will be, for you, just an ugly I remember!