Hreflang tag generator — free, with reciprocity check

Quick answer: add one row per language version, generate the tag block, and paste the SAME block into every page in the set. The reciprocity check below is the part most implementations get wrong: a cluster only works when every URL lists every other URL, including itself.

The one mistake that breaks most implementations

An hreflang cluster is a mutual claim. Google accepts it only when every URL in the set names every other URL — including itself. Miss the self-reference, or list a page that does not list you back, and the entire annotation is discarded silently. There is no error anywhere; the pages simply keep competing.

So the test is not "did I add hreflang tags". It is "does every page in this set carry the identical block". That is why the tool above generates one block to paste everywhere rather than a different block per page.

Language code, or language and region?

That last row is the trap. Narrowing the code without publishing the other regions does not make the page more relevant to France; it makes it invisible to everyone else who speaks the language. Start broad and split only when the content genuinely diverges.

x-default

x-default is the fallback for searchers you have no version for. It is commonly the English page, but that is a convention rather than a rule — a language-selector page is equally valid, and on a site whose primary market is not English, the primary-market page is the honest choice.

Canonicals and hreflang together

Each language version must canonicalise to itself. Pointing the French page's canonical at the English URL tells Google the French page should not be indexed at all, which undoes the entire cluster. The two signals answer different questions: canonical answers "which of these near-identical URLs is the real one", hreflang answers "which of these different-language pages suits this searcher".

There is a further condition that is easy to state and easy to violate: a page may only self-canonicalise if it genuinely carries translated content. A locale URL serving the English page under its own canonical is a duplicate wearing a language tag, and it is the most common way a multilingual rollout makes a site worse rather than better.

Verifying it worked

Search Console's International Targeting report lists hreflang errors including "no return tags" — the reciprocity failure above — against real crawls of your live pages. A snippet validator cannot see that, because reciprocity is a property of the set, not of any one page.

More on the Shopify specifics in Shopify hreflang.