Hreflang is an HTML tag that tells Google which versions of a page exist in other languages or regions, avoiding duplicate-content penalties for multilingual content.
Hreflang (rel="alternate" hreflang="xx") is a tag that tells Google: "This is the Romanian version. The English version is at this URL. The UK version is at another." It is used for multilingual or multi-regional sites (e.g. site.ro, site.com/en/, site.co.uk). Without hreflang, Google sees duplicate content and penalizes. With hreflang, Google indexes each version separately and ranks them for the right locations/languages. Format: <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://site.com/en/article/" />
Multilingual sites without hreflang are penalized for duplicate content. With correct hreflang, each version ranks separately and gets independent credit.
Source: Google — HreflangTechnical SEO covers the optimizations of your site's infrastructure — crawlability, indexing, loading speed, HTTPS and data structure — that let Google find and understand your pages.
Duplicate content = the same (or very similar) content on multiple URLs. Google penalizes pages with internal and external duplicate content.
A canonical URL is the rel="canonical" attribute that tells Google which is the "true" version of a page when duplicate versions exist (e.g. with and without www, with and without a trailing slash).
Core Web Vitals are 3 technical Google metrics — LCP, INP and CLS — that measure page user experience and have been official ranking factors since 2021.
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