Is it compulsory to use hreflang attribute for Multilingual site? What if I do not use such tag?

[wright335]

Hello Everybody,

My main site - abcd.co.uk and other sites are like this se.abcd.co.uk, fr.abcd.co.uk, es.abcd.co.uk etc Now if I donot use hreflang for Multilingual site then google will consider it as subdomain or duplicate site? But content of the sites are in different language.

Thanks!

[mcmnetjames]

Hi there,

From an SEO perspective, I think it is definitely worth implementing hreflang. If it were one of our clients, I would tell them that it was vital that they implement these.

We have had issues with clients where their web agency didn't correctly implement hreflang and the wrong international website was ranking. These tags are a strong signal to search engines, such as Google, of which country your websites are targeting. Some SEOs would even argue that the tags will help your ranking for those countries.

I would also be worried about duplicate content in this case, but I would strongly advise that the tags are added if possible.

Just make sure that they are properly implemented! Here are a couple of resources for further reading:

https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag 

https://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool 

Best regards,

James

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

I wouldn't be worried about duplicate content at all, it's in a different language so they would make it as unique as possible. If you would have a Canadian site and a US one then for sure it wouldn't be a good thing but this isn't a case of duplicate content.

HREF Lang mostly takes care of ranking the right language for the right keyword in the right country. What I've seen before in these cases is that some sites rank with another domain which has a higher domain authority/ page authority then the page you would like to rank.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

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-Andy