How does Weglot manage your website's SEO
In this article, you'll learn how Weglot manages your website's SEO to ensure that all the versions of your website are indexed by Google.
Weglot follows multilingual SEO best practices as recommended by Google. Some implementation details may vary depending on your integration:
Other integrations
When setting up Weglot according to our integration guides, you have three main options:
- JavaScript integration: This involves copy-pasting a code snippet into your website’s header. This method does not offer SEO benefits, as translations are rendered client-side and are not crawlable by search engines.
- Subdomain integration: This method enables SEO-friendly multilingual URLs, such as
fr.yourwebsite.com. - Subdirectory integration: Like subdomains, this provides SEO advantages with URLs like
yourwebsite.com/fr/.
Multilingual SEO: Google's Best Practice Guidelines
To ensure your translated pages are properly indexed, Weglot handles the following key aspects, in line with Google’s recommendations:
I. Unique URLs for each language version
With subdomain or subdirectory integration, each language version of your website is assigned a dedicated URL:
- Subdomain:
fr.yourwebsite.com - Subdirectory:
yourwebsite.com/fr/
These URLs allow search engines to index each version separately.
II. Hreflang tags for language and regional targeting
Weglot automatically adds hreflang tags to your original site’s <head> , and injects them into translated pages. These tags inform Google that multiple language versions of the same content exist, helping with accurate indexing and avoiding duplicate content penalties.
⚠️ If you're using Webflow, please refer to the section at the bottom of this article for specifics.
About the "x-default" tag
Weglot does not include the x-default hreflang tag by default, as it’s generally unnecessary.
This tag is only useful if you have a language selection homepage that doesn’t correspond to a specific language.
If you need to add it manually, refer to your CMS or hosting provider’s documentation.
For further details, see Google’s hreflang documentation.
III. Translations embedded in the source code and not just dynamically
Unlike JavaScript-based solutions, Weglot performs server-side translation when using subdomains or subdirectories. This means the translated content is embedded directly in the HTML source, making it fully visible and indexable by Google, unlike client-side translations, which are typically ignored by search engines.
IV. Automatic detection and translation of SEO-relevant tags on your website
Weglot detects and translates:
Meta tags, such as meta descriptions.
E.g., Meta-description for the English version of the website:
E.g., Meta-description for the French version of the website:
altattributes of<img>tags, corresponding to the alternative text displayed if an image cannot be rendered.- Page titles, structured data, and more.
This is done server-side to ensure visibility and indexation by search engines.
Weglot follows Google's best practices for multilingual SEO. Therefore, with Weglot, all your translated pages will be indexed and displayed to foreign visitors without any additional work from the website owner.
Special notes for Webflow (subdomain integration only)
The instructions below only concern the subdomain integration on Webflow.
When using subdomain integration on Webflow, please be aware:
- Hreflang tags on subpages (not the homepage) do not include relative URLs in the original version's source code.
- However, relative URLs are correctly added to the translated versions.
Google can still associate the original and translated pages correctly, and this does not impact SEO negatively.
That said, we’ve developed a workaround to manually add relative URLs to the original version of category, blog, and product pages:
- Webflow: GitHub – Weglot Hook for Webflow
This process requires command-line usage. Please share it with your developer if needed.