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Frontend question · Internationalization › Locale detection & routing

You add hreflang links for your English pages for the United States and the United Kingdom. Which value is correct for the UK page?

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://example.com/us/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="??" href="https://example.com/uk/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />
en-GB

An hreflang value is a language code, optionally followed by a region code. The ISO region code for the United Kingdom is GB, so British English is en-GB.

"uk" is the tempting wrong answer. It is the language code for Ukrainian, so it tells search engines the page is in Ukrainian. en-UK uses a region code that doesn't exist, and gb alone isn't a language. Also, every language version must list all the versions, including itself. x-default marks the page for users who match none.