Hreflang
Short definition
Hreflang is a technical tag that tells a search engine which language and country a page is written for.
When the same content exists in Turkish and English, hreflang directs the search engine to show the English page to an English-speaking visitor and the Turkish page to a Turkish one. Set it up wrong and the engine can surface the wrong language in the wrong market.
Hreflang does not guarantee translation quality on its own, it only decides which version gets shown to whom. It usually lives in the page's head or in the sitemap, and every language version needs to reference the others in return.
A common mistake is skipping hreflang entirely and relying only on an automatic redirect based on browser language; a search engine's crawler does not follow that kind of redirect, so pages still get indexed under the wrong language. Another frequent error is a one-way link, where page A points to page B but B never points back; a set of tags that is not reciprocal is treated as invalid altogether.
Why it matters
Without hreflang on a multilingual site, a search engine can show a Turkish page to an English visitor, losing that market's attention before the page even loads properly.
Illustrative example
A spa chain launched a separate page for the UK market but forgot the hreflang tag, and Google kept showing the Turkish page to UK visitors for weeks.
