hreflang? what is it? where does it come from?

Hreflang tags are a technical solution for sites that have similar content in multiple languages. The owner of a multilingual site wants search engines to send people to the content in their own language. Say a user is Dutch and the page that ranks is English, but there’s also a Dutch version. You would want Google to show the Dutch page in the search results for that Dutch user. This is the kind of problem hreflang was designed to solve.

And for the Webmasters who serve several versions of their content in different languages or for users in different countries should use hreflang annotations to help Google show the right version in the search results for each user.

In this article, "How to implement hreflang tags...", the author has lay out the steps from begin to finish on the right ways of implementing hreflang tags for your multilingual and multinational web sites.

In another article, "hreflang: the ultimate guide", the author has outlined the very detail explanation and technical implementation on how to set up hreflang.