Hreflang

The link metadata that tells search engines which URLs are language alternates of a page. Riebeckite generates it from the translations that exist for a note.

Output

<link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='https://example.com/docs/hello/'>
<link rel='alternate' hreflang='ja' href='https://example.com/ja/docs/hello/'>

Generated from translations

The links are built from a note's translations, so adding a language version adds its alternate link automatically.

Hreflang generation

Riebeckite generates hreflang link metadata through the l10n plugin's addLocalizationHeadTags function (packages/plugins/l10n/src/l10n.ts). For each note with translation relationships, the plugin emits one <link rel="alternate" hreflang="…"> per existing translation language. These head tags are added to the note's entry.headTags during manifest creation and are rendered by the site shell in the page <head>.

The hreflang format follows BCP 47, using language tags such as en, ja, en-US, zh-CN. The href value is the resolved permalink for each language version, built using buildPostUrl from the resolved config.

<link rel='alternate' hreflang='en' href='https://example.com/docs/hello/'>
<link rel='alternate' hreflang='ja' href='https://example.com/ja/docs/hello/'>

This works in combination with the SEO plugin to provide language alternates for search engine optimization.

Related terms