What is the difference between HTML lang attribute and LINK hreflink attribute?

ubuntu_ulysses

Let say example.com has two different country version apart from main English version Israel(example.il) New Zealand(example.nz) What SEO practice should I follow. Method 1 - HTML lang example.com <html lang="en"> example.il <html lang="he-IL"> example.nz <html lang="en-NZ"> Method 2 - HTML hreflang link inside head tag example.com <head> <link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com/" hreflang="en" /> <link rel="alternate"...

Originally asked by rram on Stack Exchange (webmasters) (CC BY-SA 4.0).

uphilltech

Great question — answering as the UphillTech team:

Which method should I use ... What is the difference between <html lang> and <link hreflang> . You can use both. The lang attribute on the html tag informs user-agents the language of the current document. The hreflang attribute informs user-agents/bots of the location of alternative localised versions of the current document. In a way they are complementary. However, Google most probably ignores the lang attribute and auto-detects the document language instead. I believe Google ignores all language identifiers, except for hreflang . hreflang on the other hand is recommended by Google to help indexing of multi-lingual websites. So, if you needed to choose one or the other then the hreflang...

Full answer by DocRoot: https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/a/106006 (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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