hreflang is an HTML link attribute (or an equivalent HTTP header or sitemap entry) that tells search engines which language and, optionally, regional version of a page to show to users in different locales.
Definition
hreflang is an HTML link attribute (or an equivalent HTTP header or sitemap entry) that tells search engines which language and, optionally, regional version of a page to show to users in different locales. Each language or region version of a page lists all the other versions, including itself, with their language-region codes, so the search engine can serve a Russian speaker in Russia the ru-RU page and an English speaker the en page for the same content.
hreflang does not consolidate ranking signals the way canonical does — each version is indexed and can rank on its own — it only influences which version is shown to which user. The annotations must be reciprocal (if page A points to page B as an alternate, B must point back to A) and must use valid ISO language and country codes, or search engines ignore the set.
In context
For an iGaming affiliate site running English and Russian versions (as many CIS-facing sites do), hreflang is what keeps the two from competing with each other and what ensures each audience lands on the right one. The common setup is en for the default/English content and ru for the Russian, with the two versions cross-referencing each other and each also declaring a self-referential hreflang.
An x-default annotation points to the version to show users whose locale matches nothing specific.
The frequent failure modes are non-reciprocal annotations (the RU page lists the EN page but not vice versa, so the set is dropped), pointing hreflang at redirecting or non-canonical URLs, mixing hreflang with a cross-language canonical (which tells the search engine to ignore one version entirely), and generating the tags from a template that gets the codes or the URLs wrong at scale. Because hreflang errors are silent — the tags just get ignored and users see the wrong-language result — validation with a dedicated hreflang checker after any template or URL change is part of maintaining a bilingual affiliate site.
Worked example
A bilingual affiliate finds its Russian pages sometimes rank for English queries and vice versa. An audit shows the hreflang annotations are not reciprocal — the RU template lists the EN alternate but the EN template omits the RU one.
Fixing the EN template to declare both alternates and a self-reference makes the set valid, and each audience begins landing on the correct version.
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Frequently asked questions
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