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We are trying to figure what is the correct hreflang attributes that should be displayed on our pages. We have 4 languages that we will enable for all our pages: English, French, Spanish, German. Our site is setup as below.

  • All English pages will be accessible through https://www.example.com/some-path
  • All French pages will be accessible through https://fr.example.com/some-path
  • All Spanish pages will be accessible through https://es.example.com/some-path
  • All German pages will be accessible through https://de.example.com/some-path

What is the correct format to display the hreflang attributes so that it is crawled correctly by search engines without taking a hit for SEO?

Here is what we tried.

Option 1

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-es" href="example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de" href="example.com/some-path">

Option 2

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://www.example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-es" href="https://es.example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://fr.example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="https://fr.example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de" href="https://de.example.com/some-path">

Option 3

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="www.example.com/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-es" href="www.example.com/es-es/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="www.example.com/fr-fr/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="www.example.com/fr-ca/some-path">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de" href="www.example.com/de-de/some-path">

The goal we are trying to achieve is we want to follow the Supported language/region codes section from webmasters. At some point we will enable more languages such as French for Belgium and French for Canada

Do not specify a country code by itself. Google does not automatically derive the language from the country code. You can specify a language code by itself if you want to simplify your labeling. Adding the country code after the language to restrict the page to a specific region. Examples:

be: Belarusian language, independent of region (not Belgium French)

nl-be: Dutch for Belgium

fr-be: French for Belgium

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2 Answers 2

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The hreflang tag needs to be a fully qualified URL including a protocol part of some sort.

Take a properly formatted language tag like this one as an example:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es-es" href="https://es.example.com/some-path">

Crawlers read that tag literally like this:

There is an alternate version of this page available in the Spanish (ISO 639-1 code es) language targeted towards residents of Spain (ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 country code -es) at the URL https://es.example.com/some-path.

Using the alternate tag, you are literally telling the crawler the URL where this page's foreign-language counterpart is located. If you copy the URL from the href attribute of the tag and paste it into a fresh browser session, the foreign language page should load in your browser. That's one of the ways to know you have it set up properly.

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  • the main reason for having fr-fr is that we wanted to indicate it was French for France. At some point in phase 2 of our translation project, we will want to deploy French for Canada and French for Belgium.
    – usernameabc
    Commented Jan 9, 2019 at 23:12
  • I think the list I found of valid language codes may be wrong. I'm looking into it more.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Commented Jan 9, 2019 at 23:16
  • I believe you may be looking for ISO Language Code Table. In general, the first part is required, also called lang_code, but the second part is optional. For example for fr-CA, fr would be lang_code and CA would be country/region.
    – usernameabc
    Commented Jan 9, 2019 at 23:20
  • I updated my answer. I'm sitting here scratching my head, as the first two resources I found were incomplete and misleading. You're totally right, from what I can tell, it's all well and good to target the main region of a language using an ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 region code.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Commented Jan 9, 2019 at 23:23
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    In fact, the RFC uses de-DE as an example of a valid language code.
    – Maximillian Laumeister ♦
    Commented Jan 9, 2019 at 23:26
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Perhaps you are making this too difficult(?). Start the pages with the typical declaration:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

or, "fr-fr", or "es", etc. Goole, other search engines, and browsers will not have any question about what language to display.

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2
  • still need to display the correct hreflang attribute or are you saying that having lang=en, lang=fr-fr, and other languages negates the importance of hreflang?
    – usernameabc
    Commented Jan 10, 2019 at 21:52
  • It seems to me that they do much the same thing (i.e.; provide information to search engines and servers as to which language is contained on the page.) reference: Mozilla hreflang attribute, W3C Declaring language in HMTL
    – elbrant
    Commented Jan 11, 2019 at 0:52

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