Google’s Hreflang Clarification: It Routes Users, It Doesn’t Rank Pages

Google’s Gary Illyes has offered a useful mental model for one of international SEO’s most misunderstood implementations: hreflang routes users to the appropriate language or regional URL, but it does not make that URL rank better. In an August 2026 discussion, Illyes described hreflang variants in a duplicate cluster as “alternate names.” The... Weiterlesen: Google’s Hreflang Clarification: It Routes Users, It Doesn’t Rank Pages