hreflang sitemap

Google supports three equivalent ways to declare hreflang: <link> tags in the HTML head, an HTTP Link header, and the XML sitemap method. The sitemap approach moves all the annotations into one file, which is why sites with many locale variants lean on it. Google notes there is no ranking benefit to using more than one method at a time.

How it is structured

You declare the namespace on the urlset, then give each <url> a <loc> plus one <xhtml:link> per variant, including a self-reference.

<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/en/product</loc>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/product"/>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/produkt"/>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en/product"/>
  </url>
</urlset>

Rules that trip people up:

• Every version must list every other version and itself (bidirectional, or “return,” links). If a return link is missing, Google may ignore the annotations or interpret them incorrectly.
• Language codes use ISO 639-1, regions use ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 (so hreflang="en-gb", not en-uk). You cannot specify a region code on its own.
• x-default is the reserved fallback used when no other language or region matches the user’s browser setting.
• The order of the xhtml:link child elements does not matter, and they do not count toward the sitemap’s 50,000-URL limit; only the <loc> entries do.