Multilingual websites: five hreflang mistakes

2026-07-04 · updated 2026-10-07

Without correct linking, a multilingual site looks to a search engine like a set of similar, competing pages.

Five common mistakes

1. Translation on the same URL. If language is switched by cookie or JavaScript and the address stays the same, only one version is indexed.
2. One-way references. The Lithuanian page points to the English one, but the English page does not point back. Google ignores such pairs — the references must be reciprocal.
3. No x-default. It tells search engines what to show a visitor whose language matches none of your versions.
4. Canonical pointing to another language. That collapses all versions into one. Each page must declare itself.
5. Wrong codes. Using en-GB where en is enough, or a country code with no language.

How to check

Open the page source and find the link rel="alternate" lines. There should be one per language plus x-default. Then open one of those addresses and confirm it points back.

What hreflang does not do

It is not a redirect and it does not change rankings. It only helps a search engine show the right version to the right user. Automatic IP-based redirection usually hurts — a crawler from the US would never see the Lithuanian version.

On this site the linking is generated automatically from a single URL map — the same approach we use when building client websites.