Digital marketing term
Hreflang
Annotations that tell search engines which language or region version of a page to show. TR and EN URLs must point to each other consistently.
Detailed explanation
Each language version should list all other versions and itself. x-default is the fallback when language cannot be chosen. Broken URLs, wrong language codes, or one-way tags send the wrong language into results.
Canonicals must not fight hreflang: the Turkish canonical stays Turkish, the English one stays English, both on the production host.
Sitemaps can carry the same alternates. If a thin translation is noindexed, that is a quality choice separate from hreflang; when tags exist, both URLs should still be reachable.
Frequently asked questions
- Does hreflang add ranking points?
- No. It routes the right language to the right user. Bad setup causes language mix-ups.
- Do one-way hreflang tags work?
- They are unreliable. Each version should list the others or the relationship may be ignored.
Related terms
Internal links for the topic cluster — read these concepts together.
- SEOSEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the set of technical and content practices that help a website rank more visibly in organic search results.
- Canonical URLA Canonical URL is an HTML tag that tells search engines which address should be treated as the "primary" version among multiple pages with identical or very similar content.
- IndexingThe step after crawling when a search engine stores a page and may show it for queries. Being crawled is not enough if the page never enters the index.
- Duplicate ContentThe same or near-identical text living at more than one URL. Search engines then have to pick a version, and visibility splits.