What is Hreflang?
Turkish: Hreflang
Hreflang is an HTML signal that tells search engines the language and regional target of equivalent multilingual pages.
What is Hreflang?
Hreflang is an HTML/link signal that helps search engines understand alternate language or regional versions of the same content. Its purpose is to help show the Turkish page to users in Turkey and the English page to users searching in English.
For example, Turkish /sozluk/api-nedir and English /en/glossary/api pages can point to each other as alternates. Search engines can then treat them as language equivalents rather than duplicate pages.
How Does It Work?
Hreflang is often declared in the page <head> with rel="alternate" and values such as hreflang="tr". It can also be provided through HTTP headers or XML sitemaps. Each page should reference itself and its alternate versions reciprocally.
The x-default value is used for default pages such as a language or country selector. Language codes should follow ISO 639-1, and region codes should follow ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2, such as tr-TR, en-US, or de-DE.
Business Use
Hreflang is important for multilingual corporate sites, global e-commerce, SaaS products, and country-specific landing pages. During a migration or new language launch, incorrect hreflang can make the wrong page rank in the wrong market.
It should not be confused with a canonical URL: canonical points to the preferred URL for duplicate or similar content, while hreflang describes language and regional alternatives. In technical SEO audits, reciprocal links, 200 status codes, and exact URL matching should be checked.