Delivering your blog's or website's content in a multitude of languages can make your web entity accessible to a wider range of audience. Indeed, this is one of the many strategies webmasters employ to increase their website traffic. They can simply configure their homepages to point towards specialized content tailored for different users' different language requirement. but now, there's a new and more SEO friendly way of doing this. Webmasters can now specify such specialized homepages using a new rel-alternate-hreflang annotation that Google only just introduced, and is compatible not only with Google, but other search engines as well such as Yandex.
There are two basic ways of delivering multi-lingual content; either through redirecting users to another page with the corresponding language setting, or dynamically changing your page's content to match the preferences of the users (and based on other things as well like their geographic location etc). But whatever way you deliver the content, this markup will still work perfectly.
'Rel-Alternate-Hreflang'
Take this site as an example. Suppose we were to serve our content in four different languages, English, Spanish, French, and German. The respective URLs would look something like this.
- http://www.mybloggertricks.com/en/
- http://www.mybloggertricks.com/sp/
- http://www.mybloggertricks.com/fr/
- http://www.mybloggertricks.com/gr/
- and so on.....
If we were to add this annotation to our site, the best approach would be to use <link /> tags in the head of our HTML documents. Here's the syntax for this annotation.
<link href="http://www.mybloggertricks.com/en/" rel="alternate" hreflang="en" />
(for English content)
The 'x-default hreflang' attribute
You can use the "x-default" value in the hreflang attribute to indicate that a page indicated by the href attribute doesn't have any specific language preferences, and is the default page for any type of audience. This should be used when the link points to the homepage, and not to any language-specific page. For example;
<link href="http://www.mybloggertricks.com/" rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" />
As mentioned earlier, it doesn't matter whether you change the content of your website dynamically to accommodate different languages, or redirect users to specific pages. This annotation will still work. If you have problems with using this annotations, please feel free to ask us in the comments below. Also share your feedback on the selection of topics at our blog =D
