If you own or manage a website, it’s important that you know about self-referencing hreflang tags. These tags can help ensure that your content is properly indexed and displayed in the correct language for each region of the world. In this blog post, we’ll explain what a self-referencing hreflang tag is and how to use them.
What is a Self-Referencing Hreflang Tag?
A self-referencing hreflang tag—also known as an “hreflang”—is an HTML element that helps search engines understand which language or regional version of a page should be used in response to a user query.
It tells search engines which language versions of pages exist on your site and where they are located.
This ensures that when users search for something in their native language, they get results from your site instead of from competitors who may have translated versions of their pages available.
How Do Self-Referencing Hreflang Tags Work?
The key to making sure your content is indexed correctly is adding the right self-referencing hreflangs to your webpages.
The first step is to identify all the different languages and regions you want to target with your content. Once you have identified these languages/regions, you need to add hreflangs for each one.
Here’s an example:
In this example, there are four different versions of the same page (one US English version, one Mexico Spanish version, one Canada French version, and one “default,” which points back to the US English version).
Each version has its unique URL and its corresponding self-referencing hreflang tag pointing back to it so that search engines know where it can find each version of the page when someone searches for it in their native language or region.
Conclusion:
Self referencing hreflangs are essential if you want your content to be indexed correctly by search engines and displayed appropriately for different regions and languages around the world.
By understanding how these tags work and adding them correctly on all relevant pages on your website, you can ensure that users in any part of the world will be able to easily find what they are looking for on your site regardless of what language they use when searching online!
Checkout pages won't be detected by ConveyThis as they belong to another domain. Indeed, knowing that these pages are hosted by Shopify itself, translations will be directly handled on its side. In any circumstances, your checkout will be automatically translated in the related destination languages thanks to a mechanism we manage.