Multilingual Website Setup

What this collection helps with

Translated pages need clear signals for search engines: hreflang tags that connect equivalent pages, canonical URLs that point to the right version, and robots directives that keep indexing unambiguous. This collection covers the tags that make multilingual sites easier to crawl and surface correctly.

Best for

• Setting up hreflang tags for a site with two or more languages.
• Keeping canonical URLs correct across language versions.
• Preparing social previews and crawler rules for localized pages.

Workflow steps

1. Identify all language versions of each page: List every page on your site that has translated equivalents. Each page in the group should have the same content in a different language. Note the URL of every version including the default language page.
2. Generate hreflang tags: Use the hreflang tag generator to create link tags that connect all language versions of a page. Include self-referencing tags so each page links to every alternate version including itself.
3. Set canonical URLs per language: Generate a canonical tag for each language version pointing to the equivalent page in that same language. The canonical URL should match the hreflang entry so search engines see consistent signals.
4. Create localized social preview tags: Generate Open Graph and Twitter Card tags for each language version. Translate the og:title, og:description, and og:url for each language. Use language-specific images when the featured image contains text that needs translation.
5. Configure robots directives for translated content: Use the robots.txt builder to add language-specific sections if search engines should crawl translated pages differently. In most cases, all language versions should be crawlable and indexable.
6. Add link rel alternate tags: Generate alternate link tags in the head of each page to indicate available language alternatives. These tags complement hreflang and help search engines and browsers understand the language options.

Prerequisites

• A site with content translated into at least two languages, each on its own URL path.
• A consistent URL structure for language versions, such as example.com/en/page and example.com/fr/page or subdomain-based patterns like en.example.com.
• ISO 639-1 language codes for all languages used, such as en for English, fr for French, ja for Japanese.

Publishing checklist

• Every page in a language group has a complete set of hreflang tags linking to all versions including itself.
• Canonical URLs on translated pages point to the same-language URL, not the default language version.
• Hreflang tags use the correct language codes from the ISO 639-1 standard, not invented codes or country codes alone.
• Open Graph tags on translated pages use translated text, not the default language title and description.
• The x-default hreflang entry is set if you have a language selector or fallback page for unspecified language preferences.
• Robots.txt does not block translated pages from crawling unless there is a specific reason such as thin content.

Related collections

Blog Publisher Toolkit, GitHub Pages Publishing Workflow