More and more Indian websites publish in more than one language: an English and a Hindi version of a news site, a bank's product pages in Marathi and Tamil, a government scheme explained in a dozen languages. Hreflang is the mechanism that tells Google these pages are translations of each other, so it can show the Hindi page to someone searching in Hindi and the English page to someone searching in English.

Key takeaways from this guide

When you need hreflang

• The same content in different languages (English and Hindi versions of a service page).
• The same language for different regions with different details (English pages for India and for the UAE with different prices).

You don't need it for a single-language site, or for pages that aren't equivalents. A Hindi blog post that isn't a translation of any English page needs no hreflang.

The codes

Each hreflang value is a language code (ISO 639-1), optionally followed by a region code (ISO 3166-1 alpha-2):

The region is optional. If you only have one English and one Hindi version, en and hi are enough. Never use a region code alone ("IN" is not a language).

Implementation in the HTML head

Each version lists all versions, including itself:

<!-- On https://example.com/en/home-loan -->
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-IN" href="https://example.com/en/home-loan">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="hi-IN" href="https://example.com/hi/home-loan">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/home-loan">

<!-- On https://example.com/hi/home-loan: exactly the same three lines -->

The "return link" rule is the one most often broken: if the English page points to the Hindi page, the Hindi page must point back. Without the return link, Google may ignore the annotation.

Our hreflang tag generator creates the full set of tags for any number of versions.

Other ways to add hreflang

• XML sitemap: list alternates for each URL with xhtml:link elements. Easier to manage on large sites because it keeps the head clean.
• HTTP headers: for non-HTML files like PDFs.

Use one method consistently; mixing them invites contradictions.

Structuring language versions

Mistakes that break hreflang

1. Missing return links, explained above.
2. Wrong codes: in instead of hi for Hindi, or en-UK (the correct code is en-GB).
3. Canonical pointing to the other language. The Hindi page's canonical must point to itself, not to the English page. Otherwise you're telling Google the Hindi page is a duplicate to be ignored. See our canonical guide.
4. Hreflang URLs that redirect or 404. Use final, 200-status URLs.
5. Machine translation left unchecked. Hreflang can't fix low-quality translations; Google can still judge the page as unhelpful.
6. Automatic redirects by browser language that stop Googlebot (which usually crawls without a language preference) from seeing all versions. Let users switch languages with links instead.

Writing in Hindi and regional languages

• Translate titles and meta descriptions too, not just the body. Check them with the meta tags checker.
• Research keywords in each language; people often search in a mix of scripts, or in Hinglish typed in Latin letters. A Hindi page might also need to answer "home loan kaise le" style searches.
• Set the lang attribute on the html tag (<html lang="hi">).
• Use readable URLs. Many sites keep slugs in English or transliterated even for Hindi pages because Devanagari URLs turn into long encoded strings when shared.

Checking it works

View the source of each language version and confirm the hreflang set is identical on every page. Then use URL inspection in Search Console for a Hindi page and check Google indexed it as its own canonical. If Google treats translations as duplicates, the canonical or return links are usually the cause.