Hreflang - Is it needed even if the site is only one language

[JonAlonsoCNC]

This topic came up in a discussion I had with a fellow SEO colleague, I don't believe it makes sense to have Hreflang if you don't have a second language but according to my friend they mentioned that it is great if your only targeting one country. Any opinions out in the Moz community?  It seems like overkill to me

[seoelevated]

This may be a little bit outside the scope of the original question, but another use for hreflang tags is when you only have a single language, but localized content in different countries.

So, for example let's say you have web sites/pages in the US and Australia. Both are in English. But you differ the content for each market. In that case, you would use hreflang tags to relate a similar page/site between the two countries. "en-us" and "en-au".

I realize that's not exactly what the original post asked. But adding this info to what has already been answered.

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi Jonathan,

I agree with you, I'd say it's complete overkill for most sites that only have 1 country & language that they're targeting. If it could be a country that covers multiple languages then I would reconsider this. But with most companies that I've seen work with HREF Lang it's already a lengthy and intense process that usually is only worth it when you focus on creating content for multiple languages.

Martijn.

[effectdigital]

Hreflang means the tags that go between different pages and show Google the way to the same content in other languages. There are also your standard language tags, which perform a very similar function to the self-referencing hreflang. IMO, it should be enough to just use language tags e.g:

^ for French. You can even specify a region and a language like:

I would have thought this would be enough to tell Google what language and region a page is targeted at (you can come up with any number of combinations using the HTML ISO country codes and the HTML ISO language codes)

However, according to SEO best practice this is wrong. Even if you only target one language / country, and you do not require the utility of hreflang tags (pointing Google to other language variants of pages) - you are apparently still supposed to have a self-referencing hreflang tag on your pages (confirming the active language)

Since this is what language tags (which existed long before hreflangs) are supposed to do, it seems really stupid to me. But that's the way it is, for whatever reason

In summary, yes do use self referencing hreflangs AND the appropriate language tags in concert