Hreflang Tag Generator

hreflang tells Google that several URLs are the same page in different languages, so it serves the right one and stops treating them as duplicates competing with each other. It is a signal about which version to show, not about ranking.

It is also the one piece of international SEO that a multilingual site cannot skip and cannot half-do. A site in one language never needs it; a site in two needs it on every page of every pair, and the failure mode for getting it partly right is the same as for leaving it out entirely.

The rule that breaks most clusters is reciprocity. Every page in a set must name every page in the set — itself included. If the English page lists the Arabic one but the Arabic page lists nothing, Google discards the whole group rather than honouring half of it, and nothing in Search Console names the page that broke it. That is why the same block goes on every page unchanged, and why this asks for the page's own URL to check the self-reference is there.

x-default is not a language. It is what to serve a reader whose language matches none of the sets. Usually it points at the same URL as your primary language, which is why it repeats one of the hrefs — and why a duplicate-target warning that fires on it is a warning that teaches people to ignore warnings.

The language tag has a shape. The language goes first in lowercase, the region after it in uppercase: en-GB, never en_GB or EN-gb. A region on its own is never valid — there is no hreflang="GB", because a country is not a language.

Absolute URLs only. A relative href is discarded without a word, the same failure the sitemap generator guards against. It is a slow failure: everything looks correct for weeks.

Three places will carry these, and one is enough. The head of each page, an HTTP header, or the sitemap. Pick one. Declaring the same cluster in two places is not redundancy — it is two chances to disagree, and a disagreement invalidates both.