Using <link rel="alternate" href="#" hreflang="en-ie" /> within the <body>and not the <head>, testing it in W3C validator fails and reports the following:
A link element must not appear as a descendant of a body element unless the link element has an itemprop attribute or has a rel attribute whose value contains dns-prefetch, pingback, preconnect, prefetch, preload, prerender, or stylesheet
It has been mentioned by Rob and Boldewyn, in both answers and comments that hreflang can be used within a <a>, since these tags are allowed within the body. This is true and both users make good points, however...
It can be very complex using hreflang within <a> and its unclear if its supported by Google:
- You need to make all links to page use the markup, so if you have many articles interlinking one another, it can become complex, very complex if having more than 2 language options. Adding markup to the page rather than links is less complex because you simply do a GET URL and plant that variable into link canonical, link hreflang, Facebook opengraph, Twitter cards etc.
- The main issue however is Google's Search Console Help mentions nothing of using
<a>for Multiple languages, this isn't to say its not supported, its just that I can say for sure it is.
Google specific says it supports:
HTML link element in header. In the HTML section of
http://www.example.com/, add a link element pointing to the Spanish version of that webpage athttp://es.example.com/, like this:<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="http://es.example.com/" />HTTP header. If you publish non-HTML files (like PDFs), you can use an HTTP header to indicate a different language version of a URL:
<http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es"To specify multiple hreflang values in a Link HTTP header, separate the values with commas like so:
<http://es.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="es">, <http://de.example.com/>; rel="alternate"; hreflang="de">Sitemap. Instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.
I recommend that you verify your MARKUP on-going using W3C validator, for example using this direct input code:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>Simon Hayter Rocks!</title>
<link rel="stylesheet" href="example.css">
<script src="example.js"></script>
</head>
<body>
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/en-ie" hreflang="en-ie" />
</body>
</html>