Multilingual SEO Done Right: hreflang, Canonical and Sitemaps
Sara MohammadiLead Product Designer
Multilingual SEO is simple if you get three rules right — and most sites get exactly these three wrong.
1. Bidirectional, complete hreflang
Every page must reference all of its language versions (including itself) plus an x-default. One-way references are invalid as far as Google is concerned.
2. Canonical to the page itself, not the default language
A common mistake: canonicalizing the English version to the Persian one. Each language version is independent content and must canonicalize to itself; hreflang describes the relationship between languages — canonical does not.
3. Sitemaps with alternates
Your sitemap should declare the language versions of every URL via xhtml:link. In Next.js, sitemap.ts with alternates.languages makes this a few lines of code.
Fix these three first, then invest in content — without this foundation, even the best content gets lost between languages.