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Language Tags

The Language Tags tab lets you manage the hreflang tags of your website.

These tags help search engines understand which language and country variants of a page are available. As a result, visitors coming from search engines can be sent to the right language version automatically.

What are language tags?​

Language tags (also known as hreflang tags) are HTML tags that indicate which language versions of a page are available.

An example:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://voorbeeld.nl/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl-nl" href="https://voorbeeld.nl/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://voorbeeld.nl/en/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-de" href="https://voorbeeld.nl/de/" />

Search engines use this information to send visitors to the most relevant language version of a page.

Why are language tags important?​

When the same content is available in multiple languages, search engines may consider those pages highly similar.

Adding hreflang tags means:

  • search engines understand that the pages belong together;
  • the right language version is shown in search results;
  • international indexing is improved;
  • duplicate content issues are avoided.

Enabling Clonable language tags​

The plugin can generate language tags automatically for all connected clones.

When this option is enabled, the plugin automatically adds the required hreflang tags to every page.

URL translations in language tags​

When to enable?​

Use Translate URLs in language tags when you use URL translations within Clonable.

Example:

LanguageURL
Dutch/over-ons
English/about-us
German/uber-uns

When URL translations are active, the plugin has to look up the correct translated URL for every page.

When to disable?​

Not using URL translations?

In that case we recommend disabling this option.

This avoids unnecessary URL lookups and can improve your website's performance.

My website already has hreflang tags​

Some SEO plugins add hreflang tags of their own.

Examples are:

  • WPML
  • TranslatePress
  • Polylang
  • custom SEO solutions

When your website already generates correct hreflang tags, there is usually no need to use the Clonable language tags as well.

So always check first whether your website already contains hreflang tags before enabling this feature.

Checking whether language tags work​

You can check whether the tags are present by viewing the source code of a page.

Then look for:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="..." />

A separate hreflang tag should be visible for every active clone.

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