This is a recording of a talk given at the International Search Summit Barcelona 2021. Hreflang has been one of the most challenging, complicated and unpredictable elements of technical SEO. After doing hundreds of implementations, Gerry White from Rise at Seven has learnt a tonne about the reasons it can go wrong, why Google really does just treat it as a hint and not a directive, and why even when it is all perfect, it can still not achieve the desired results. This talk explores hreflang in depth and explains how to look at the data, evaluate the results and monitor it.
