Vital Hreflang & Multi Language Website Mistakes That Most Webmasters Make

The internet gives a business the power to compete on a global level. Gone are the days when your only competitor was the other shop across the road. If you sell your products or services on a website, you have the power to quickly expand beyond your country’s borders, without spending millions of dollars on opening new physical stores.

But in order to do this, you have to speak their native or preferred language. And, in order to speak their language, you need to translate your website. Apparently, setting up a multi language website is one of the trickiest things in the digital marketing field. International SEO is pretty hard! Beside translating it the right way, you can run into a lot of other technical issues, most of them regarding incorrect indexation and display of the language versions by Google.

Even more, Google has recently changed the way it displays websites internationally . You can no longer see the results in another country by simply visiting its Google version. Instead, you have to go through the search settings and select the specific country and language. This shows Google’s interest to make search results more relevant by location, so it’s more important than ever to get everything right!

In this small international SEO guide, we’re going to try to solve some of the more complicated issues regarding multilingual websites and hopefully shed some light on the most common hreflang mistakes and other general multilingual website issues that webmasters make when they start expanding internationally.

Technical Multilingual SEO & Hreflang Related Issues

Technical issues in multilingual websites are more common on custom builds. It might not always be the webmaster’s fault, but as long as you have the information and leave the problems there, you have no excuse. Here are some of the most common technical problems around the web and how to properly fix them.

Bad Implementation of the rel=”alternate” and hreflang Attributes

Oh, the hreflangs! Studies show that around 75% percent of the hreflang implementations have mistakes in them. To be honest, while I was searching for examples online, many multi lingual websites did not even have the hreflang implemented at all!

That’s a concern, because not only does that prevent you from ranking high in other countries, but it also dilutes your website’s content, making it seem less relevant in Google’s eyes.

So what is this hreflang attribute? Well, in theory, it’s pretty simple:

The hreflang attribute is a way of telling Google “Hey, I have another localized version of my website here, and it’s in this language.”

Here’s a video from SEJ where Bill Hunt is explaining exactly what HREFlang is and how to use it correctly.

Of course, if you don’t use it, Google is probably able to figure things out on its own. But multilingual sites that help Google figure things out easier are known to get a boost in rankings! Here’s a good example from SeerInteractive that shows a traffic growth after the hreflang attribute has been correctly implemented:

Here are the most common mistakes that people do when implementing the hreflang attribute:

No hreflang attribute: Of course, the first rule would be to have the hreflang annotation in your HTML. As I said, I found many examples that don’t contain the attribute at all.

No self-referencing URL: On Google’s official page about multilanguage websites, it’s clearly stated that you must use a self-referencing rel=”alternate” hreflang attribute.


If you have multiple language versions of a URL, each language page should identify different language versions, including itself. For example, if your site provides content in French, English, and Spanish, the Spanish version must include a `rel="alternate" hreflang="x"` link for itself in addition to links to the French and English versions. Similarly, the English and French versions must each include the same references to the French, English, and Spanish versions.
	Google
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Incorrect language / country codes: The language code is very often misspelled. Many times, webmasters and web developers use the country code instead of the language code. Here are some official Google insights:

Conflicts, Bad Implementation and Confusion Regarding the rel=”canonical” Tag

People still don’t understand what the canonical tag does. They have a vague idea about it, but many times use it the wrong way. In a nutshell, here’s what the canonical tag actually does:

The rel=”canonical” tag tells search engines what page to display in their results pages.

To better understand the tag, think of it like this: if you have 10 web pages about the same subject, they will start competing with each other in the search engines. This confuses Google, so you can use the canonical tag to help it figure things out, and point to the exact page you prefer being shown in the search engines.

Conclusion

A multilingual website with properly performed international SEO is definitely something not easy to set up but, hopefully, this article helped you understand how to avoid the most common HREFlang mistakes if you’re planning to translate your website. It’s an evergreen piece of content, just as actual in 2019 or 2020 and most likely in 2021, as some rules are there to stay.