For a UAE website with Arabic and English versions of the same page, hreflang Arabic English markup is a small set of link tags on every page that lists the Arabic URL, the English URL and a fallback, each as a full https address. If the site has one version per language, the codes are usually ar and en, with x-default pointing at the English page or a language selector. The rule to get right first is the return link: Google’s documentation says that if two pages do not both point to each other, the tags are ignored.
Hreflang does not make a page rank higher. It tells Google which of two equivalent pages to show a particular searcher, so an Arabic speaker in Sharjah sees the Arabic service page and an English speaker in Dubai Marina sees the English one.
Key takeaways
- Every language version must list itself and every other version, or Google ignores the tags between those pages.
- Use ISO 639-1 language codes, optionally followed by an ISO 3166-1 region code, so ar, en, ar-AE and en-AE are valid, while ae means a different language and the UK in en-UK is ignored.
- With one Arabic and one English version, plain ar and en are simpler and harder to get wrong than region codes.
- The canonical tag on the Arabic page should point to the Arabic page, never to the English one.
- Google reads visible content to detect language, so a half-translated page is still an English page whatever its tags say.
- Search Console no longer has an International Targeting report, so hreflang has to be checked by hand or with a crawler.
What hreflang does on a bilingual UAE site
Google’s guide to localized versions of your pages (last updated 22 December 2025) describes hreflang as a way to tell Google about the language and regional variants of a page. It also says Google does not use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect a page’s language. Hreflang is a switching instruction, not a label that makes English text count as Arabic.
That distinction matters for UAE businesses because some “Arabic” sites are really English sites with an Arabic menu. Google’s multi-regional and multilingual sites guide (last updated 10 December 2025) warns that translating only the boilerplate while the main content stays in one language makes for a bad experience when the same content appears several times in results. The same localized-versions page adds that language versions are only treated as duplicates when the main content is left untranslated. A Dubai clinic whose Arabic page has an Arabic header, footer and booking button but English treatment descriptions has not built an Arabic page, whatever its hreflang says.
When hreflang is wrong, the symptom is rarely a penalty. It is the wrong URL appearing, such as the English page showing for an Arabic query. One issue we often see is a business owner concluding that “Arabic SEO does not work in the UAE” when the Arabic pages were never eligible to be shown.
The language and region codes to use
Google requires the language code in ISO 639-1 format, optionally followed by a region in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. The language always comes first, and a country code on its own is not accepted. The IANA Language Subtag Registry, in the edition dated 8 August 2026, lists ar as Arabic and AE as the United Arab Emirates, which gives you ar-AE and en-AE.
Three mistakes come up repeatedly on UAE sites. The first is writing ae as if it meant the Emirates; in the same IANA registry, ae is the language code for Avestan, so hreflang=”ae” declares the page as Avestan and says nothing about the Emirates. The second is inventing a code such as ar-UAE, which is not a valid ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 value. The third affects firms that also target British clients: Google’s guide says codes reserved for something else, naming EU, UN and UK, have no effect, so en-UK is read as English with no region. The correct code is en-GB.
The folder name is not a signal either. Google’s guide says language names in URLs, such as /ar/ or an en-gb subdomain, are not used to decide the target audience.
Whether to add the region at all depends on how many versions you have. Google’s guide says a language code on its own is valid, and that when you have several versions for the same language in different countries, you should also provide a catch-all URL for speakers of that language in unspecified locations. For a Dubai business with one version per language, a region code adds nothing and narrows the stated audience to the UAE, even though a Saudi founder researching a Dubai free zone may need the same Arabic page.
| Your site | Codes we would use | Why |
|---|---|---|
| One Arabic and one English version, UAE business | ar, en, x-default | Nothing to distinguish by country, so region codes only add risk |
| Separate Arabic pages for UAE and Saudi Arabia with different prices or licensing terms | ar-AE, ar-SA, ar, en, x-default | The region codes now carry real differences; ar is the catch-all for other Arabic speakers |
| English pages for the UAE and the UK, one Arabic version | en-AE, en-GB, en, ar, x-default | GB, not UK; en covers English speakers elsewhere |
A correct tag set for an Arabic and English service page
Take a business setup firm with pages at /en/company-formation/ and /ar/company-formation/. Both carry the identical block below in their head, including a line for themselves. Google’s guide requires fully qualified URLs with the protocol, so https://example.com/ar/company-formation/ is correct and /ar/company-formation/ or //example.com/ar/company-formation/ is not.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/company-formation/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" href="https://example.com/ar/company-formation/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en/company-formation/" />Each URL in the block has to match the page’s real address character for character. If the site’s canonical URLs end with a trailing slash, the hreflang URLs need the slash too; https://example.com/ar/company-formation and https://example.com/ar/company-formation/ are different URLs to a crawler, and a mismatch points the tag at a redirect or a duplicate address instead of the page itself.
Arabic slugs are a separate decision. Google’s URL structure guidance (last updated 10 December 2025) recommends words in the audience’s language and shows Arabic paths written with percent encoding. That works, but those URLs turn into long strings of %D8 codes when pasted into WhatsApp, and every hreflang, canonical and sitemap entry must use identical encoding. For a small bilingual site we would usually keep ASCII slugs on both versions.
Where x-default should point
Google describes x-default as the page for users whose browser language matches none of your versions, and says it was designed for language selector pages. On a UAE site that means visitors whose browsers are set to Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Tagalog or French.
For most Dubai businesses, the English page is the sensible fallback, because a visitor who reads neither of your languages natively is more likely to manage in English than in Arabic. If your home page is a genuine chooser that asks visitors to pick Arabic or English, point x-default at that chooser instead.
Avoid a home page that silently redirects by IP address or browser language. Google’s multilingual guide asks site owners to avoid automatically redirecting users between language versions, and notes that most Google crawls originate from the US. A root URL that sends Gulf visitors to Arabic and everyone else to English can leave Googlebot seeing only the English version. A visible switch that links to the equivalent page, not back to the home page, works for users and crawlers.
Canonical tags have to agree with hreflang
Google’s page on consolidating duplicate URLs (last updated 10 July 2026) says that when you use hreflang, you should specify a canonical page in the same language. In practice, the Arabic page’s canonical points to the Arabic URL and the English page’s canonical points to the English URL.
One failure we often see on WordPress and custom-built sites is a template that sets every translation’s canonical to the English original, added to avoid “duplicate content”. The hreflang block says “here is the Arabic version” while the canonical says “use the English page instead”, and the Arabic URL can end up treated as a duplicate. The same Google page also says not to declare different canonical URLs for the same page through different methods, such as one URL in the sitemap and another in the rel=”canonical” tag.
Google adds that it prefers URLs that are part of hreflang clusters when choosing canonicals. If you run three Arabic variants and only two of them point at each other, the third is the one most likely to drop out. Point every hreflang URL at the final address that returns 200, is indexable and is canonical to itself, rather than at a URL that redirects or carries a noindex tag.
HTML, HTTP header or sitemap
Google treats the three methods as equivalent and says to choose whichever is most convenient. The same page says using all three at once brings no benefit in Search and is much harder to manage, so pick one per page type.
Link tags in the head
This suits most service sites of under a few hundred pages. On Next.js, the generateMetadata documentation (version 16.3.5, updated 25 August 2026) shows an alternates.languages object that outputs the link rel=”alternate” hreflang tags, and a metadataBase setting that turns relative paths into the fully qualified URLs Google asks for. The same page says streamed metadata can be appended to the body, and that Googlebot reads it correctly. Google’s guide says hreflang tags must sit inside a well-formed head, so if you want certainty, the documented htmlLimitedBots setting turns streaming metadata off.
HTTP Link headers
Google names this method for non-HTML files such as PDFs. It suits a Dubai firm that publishes Arabic and English versions of a company profile or price list as PDFs. It needs server or CDN configuration, so it is rarely worth it for web pages.
XML sitemap
A sitemap keeps the head clean on large sites, such as a real estate portal with thousands of Arabic and English listing pages. Google’s example uses the xhtml namespace, with every url entry listing all alternates including itself. It is also the tidiest way to pair an English .com with an Arabic site on a separate .ae domain.
The lang and dir attributes do a different job
Because Google ignores the lang attribute for language detection, some developers skip it. The W3C’s guidance on declaring language in HTML says to always put a lang attribute on the html element to declare the default language of the text. Google is not the only software that reads a page, and on the Arabic version the value is lang=”ar”.
Direction is separate. The W3C’s page on structural markup and right-to-left text says to add dir=”rtl” to the html tag for right-to-left documents, not to set base direction with CSS, and not to assume that a language declaration implies direction or the reverse. An Arabic page with lang=”ar” but no dir=”rtl” is laid out left to right, so full stops, brackets and embedded English brand names can land at the wrong end of the line.
Older SEO advice recommends a meta http-equiv=”Content-Language” tag for Bing, which the same W3C page says should never be used to indicate a page’s language. Bing’s webmaster documentation did not load when we checked on 13 September 2026, so we make no claim here about how Bing treats hreflang.
How to check hreflang after launch
Search Console used to report hreflang errors in its International Targeting report. Google’s Search Console Help page confirms that report is deprecated, while saying Google continues to support and use hreflang tags. Checking is now a manual job, so build it into your launch checklist.
- Open the source of ten page pairs, including the home page, main services and contact page, and confirm both versions carry the same block.
- Crawl the site with an SEO crawler that reports missing return links, non-200 targets and invalid codes, and fix failing templates rather than single URLs.
- Run the Arabic URLs through the URL Inspection tool and compare the user-declared canonical with the Google-selected canonical; if Google picked the English URL, the Arabic page is being treated as a duplicate.
- In the live test, use View tested page to confirm the hreflang tags are present in the HTML Google receives.
- Search your main Arabic service term with Google set to Arabic and check which URL appears, then repeat in English.
Repeat the crawl after any template change, CMS plugin update or migration. Hreflang comes from templates, so one change can break every page at once.
