This article explains what hreflang tags are, how Presspage automatically adds them to your Newsroom, and how they affect the experience of visitors arriving from Google, or any other search engine.
Table of contents
- What is a hreflang tag?
- How Presspage implements hreflang tags
- Hreflang tags in your sitemap
- How this affects your visitors
- How this affects visitors arriving via Google
What is a hreflang tag?
A hreflang tag is an HTML element that tells search engines which language, and optionally which region, a page is written for, and which URLs contain equivalent versions of that page in other languages. Search engines use this information to show the most relevant language version of a page to each visitor in search results.
How Presspage implements hreflang tags
Presspage automatically adds hreflang tags to your Newsroom. No manual setup is needed. These tags work slightly differently depending on whether they're added to your Newsroom homepage or to an individual article.
On the Newsroom homepage, Presspage adds a hreflang tag for every language you've published on your Newsroom, whether or not individual articles have been translated into that language. For example, if your Newsroom has 7 published languages, the homepage will include 7 hreflang tags, plus an
x-defaulttag pointing to the homepage in your account's default language.On an individual article, Presspage only adds hreflang tags for the languages that specific article has been translated into. If an article exists in 2 of your Newsroom's 7 languages, only those 2 languages appear in its hreflang tags, along with an
x-defaulttag pointing to that article's version in your account's default language.
You add translations to an article using the Add Translation feature. Presspage updates the article's hreflang tags automatically once a translation is published.
Hreflang tags in your sitemap
Presspage also includes the same hreflang information in your Newsroom's XML sitemap, using xhtml:link elements for each URL entry. This mirrors what's in the page's <head>: homepage entries list every published Newsroom language, and article entries list only the languages that specific article has been translated into.
Presspage providing this in both places is a redundancy in your favor: search engines that read hreflang data from either the page itself or the sitemap will find consistent information.
How this affects your visitors
Hreflang tags don't automatically redirect visitors or change what they see when browsing your Newsroom directly. A visitor who opens a specific URL sees that language version, regardless of their browser or location settings. Within the Newsroom, visitors can still switch languages manually using the language switcher.
Hreflang tags are read by search engines, not browsers, so they have no effect on the visitor's experience once they're already on your Newsroom.
How this affects visitors arriving via Google
Hreflang tags help Google show the right language version of your content directly in search results, based on the searcher's language and region settings.
Since hreflang tags are set per article, this depends on which languages that specific article has been translated into:
- If an article has been translated into a visitor's language, Google can show that translated version directly in search results.
- If an article hasn't been translated into a visitor's language, Google has no alternate version to offer for that specific article. It will typically show the version in the article's original language, even if your Newsroom supports the visitor's language elsewhere.
This means the experience differs by article. Translating an article into more languages expands the set of versions Google can match to searchers, in addition to the general benefits of publishing in a visitor's own language.