Hreflang Generator & Validator

If you maintain equivalent content in more than one language or for more than one region, hreflang helps search engines serve the right version to the right visitor, and can help avoid different language versions of the same content being treated as unrelated or duplicate pages.

A hreflang value is a language code (e.g. fr), optionally followed by a region/country code (e.g. fr-FR). The language subtag alone is enough when you don't need to distinguish between regions; the region is only added when the content genuinely differs by region. Google's own documentation specifically warns against specifying a region code alone, without a language code.

French-language content specifically intended for readers in France — as distinct from French content aimed at Canada, Belgium, or Switzerland, which would use a different region code.

Every page in an alternate-language cluster carries the exact same set of hreflang annotations, listing every version — including itself. When two pages don't both reference each other, search engines may disregard the annotations, which is why the reciprocal relationship matters as much as the syntax itself.

Canonical and hreflang serve different purposes. A canonical tag indicates the preferred version among duplicate or near-duplicate URLs; hreflang identifies alternate language/region versions of otherwise equivalent content. A common and reasonable pattern is for each localized page to canonicalize to itself, not to a single "master" language version — canonicalizing every language version to one language would tell search engines the other language versions are duplicates to be consolidated, undermining the very point of having them.

Hreflang can help clarify that near-identical pages in different languages are intentional alternates rather than duplicate content, but it isn't a duplicate-content fix by itself — it's a relationship annotation, and the underlying pages still need to be genuinely intended as distinct language/region versions.