Black Friday: New customers get 20% off any Sitebulb annual plan FOREVER! Offer ends Dec 2. Sign up now!

Dealing with International issues?

Crawl your website with Sitebulb for 300+ tech SEO checks

Try for Free
Medium This Hint is worth investigating further, and may warrant further attention depending on the type and quantity of URLs affected. Opportunity This Hint represents an opportunity for optimization.

Missing HTML lang attribute

This means that the URL in question has not defined the language/region attribute using HTML lang.

Why is this important?

While Google and Yandex use hreflang to determine which URLs to display in regional search results, some search engines, such as Bing, rely on the language specified in the HTML - commonly referred to as HTML lang.

If a URL does not set a HTML lang value, you may find that the language/region is not correctly interpreted by all search engines, which may result in the incorrect page being served in localised search results.

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any URL which has no document location.

Examples that trigger this Hint:

Consider the URL: https://example.com/en/page-a/

The Hint would trigger for this URL if it does not specify HTML language, using any of the methods below;

The "content-language" meta tag in the <head>:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en-us">

The <html lang> element in the <head>:

<html lang="en-us">

The <title lang> element in the <head>:

<title lang="en-us">

Why is this Hint marked 'Opportunity'?

In Sitebulb, this Hint is an Opportunity, as it represents a situation where you could optimize the site to potentially gain more search traffic.

Some search engines rely on HTML lang (instead of hreflang) to determine the language/region of a page, so if this is missing the language may not be correctly interpreted.

If this is an important traffic source (e.g. if the website exists in a market with high Bing usage), add the HTML lang to all pages that have hreflang.

Further Reading

Sitebulb Desktop

Find, fix and communicate technical issues with easy visuals, in-depth insights, & prioritized recommendations across 300+ SEO issues.

  • Ideal for SEO professionals, consultants & marketing agencies.

Sitebulb Cloud

Get all the capability of Sitebulb Desktop, accessible via your web browser. Crawl at scale without project, crawl credit, or machine limits.

  • Perfect for collaboration, remote teams & extreme scale.