hreflang
An annotation that tells search engines which language and region a page targets, linking equivalent versions.
hreflang tells search engines that several pages are the same content in different languages or regional variants, and which audience each one serves. It is expressed with a language code (and optional region), such as en, en-gb, or fr-ca, plus an x-default for the fallback.
It helps Google show the right version to the right user — the British English page to UK searchers, the French page to French searchers — instead of the wrong one. Done well, it reduces duplicate-content confusion between near-identical translations.
You can declare hreflang in the page head, in HTTP headers, or in an XML sitemap. The sitemap approach keeps the annotations in one place, which scales better for large multilingual sites. The critical rule is reciprocity: every page must reference all its alternates, including itself, or search engines will ignore the cluster.
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