Multilingual sites need correct hreflang so engines serve the right language and don't treat translations as duplicates. Paste a URL — we read its hreflang tags and check self-reference, x-default and reciprocity.
It tells engines that several URLs are the same content for different audiences, so the right one is shown to each. It does not boost rankings, it does not prevent duplicate-content handling, and it does not translate anything.
Its real job is preventing your Spanish page from outranking your English one for English readers — a self-inflicted problem, not a competitive one.
en-GB, not en-UK. Region alone is invalid.x-default marks the page for everyone your set does not cover — usually a language selector or the international English version.
It is optional. If you serve two locales and one is the obvious fallback, pointing x-default at it is enough; inventing a selector page just to have one is not worth it.
Enter a URL above. The checker reads its hreflang annotations and verifies self-reference, reciprocity and code validity across the set.
Only if visitors fall outside your declared locales. With a clear fallback version, pointing x-default at it is enough.
No. It tells engines which version to show to whom. Duplicate-content handling is separate and is managed with canonicals.
Hreflang is an HTML annotation that tells search engines which language and regional version of a page to serve to each user; this checker validates that those annotations are complete and consistent across every version. It flags three failure modes that break multilingual indexing — a missing self-reference, duplicate or conflicting entries, and non-reciprocal (one-way) links — plus a missing x-default fallback, an optional but recommended safeguard. Broken hreflang makes engines serve the wrong language version or ignore your alternates entirely, surfacing the wrong page to searchers and to AI answer engines that cite by URL.
Hreflang is an annotation that tells search engines the language and region a page targets. You need it whenever the same content exists in more than one language or regional variant, so engines serve the right version to each user.
Yes. Every alternate you declare must declare you back — non-reciprocal (one-way) hreflang is treated as an error and ignored by Google.
x-default names the fallback page for users whose language or region matches none of your alternates. It is optional but recommended, and usually points to a language selector or your default-language homepage.
In the <head> of each page, in an XML sitemap, or in the HTTP header. Pick one method and apply it consistently — mixing methods for the same page can cause conflicts.
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