Crawl Field Notes

hreflang alternates

hreflang annotations connect language or regional variants of substantially equivalent content.

Atlas version atlas-2026-07-28-v1 · Section: Crawler and indexing directives

How it works

Each variant names itself and its alternates using valid language-region codes, often with an optional x-default fallback.

How to validate it

Verify reciprocal annotations, canonical consistency, return status, and exact URL normalization across every member of the alternate set.

Common failure

Pointing every localized page at one canonical language can undermine the alternate cluster the hreflang annotations were meant to describe.

Machine-readable editions

The same article is available as Markdown and JSON. These alternates are linked here but are not submitted through the sitemap or IndexNow.

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