Understanding hreflang

[Kung_fu_Panda]

Got a question regarding hreflang tag and specifically about the language part:
If I have 2 parallel pages, one in German and one in English for UK users. for example:

How does google see the “language” part:

1.Based on user language – Google will display this page in the SERP according to what google believe is the user’s language based on the user’s browsers language setting, search query language ect..? in this case the German speaking user in UK will get the DE version

Or

2.The language setting in the hreflang tag just means the specified URL language
So Google will display the EN-GB version in UK both to the English & German user?

If you jave any other ideas - i will be glad to hear:)

Hope I’m clear enough.

Thanks!

[RyanPurkey]

There's actually even more scenarios to it than just that, but thankfully there's a great Moz post on this from April 2014: http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights that covers your questions, and more.

To your specifics, yes a user can set a specific language and Google will try to serve results weighted to their language settings, regardless of location (the German user in the UK per your example). They can also serve German results to anyone in Germany by default (location based).

Again, the blog post breaks it all down very well. Go take a look and you should be able to parse what you need for your exact situation.  Cheers!