Hreflang for Dutch and English sites

Hreflang says: this is Dutch, that is English. Google uses it to show the right language. Not to rank two thin pages side by side. If the English version is a three-paragraph machine translation, you do not have a pair. You have noise.

Each page to itself, and to the other language. x-default to whatever you want for unknown languages. For us that is usually NL. Absolute URLs. No tag to a redirect. Mixing nl-NL and nl is how you invent an extra variant that does not exist.

Intent has to match. Pricing with pricing, not with home. I often see only the homepage done, or the English slug 404ing. Return link missing: NL points at EN, EN points nowhere. Then Google guesses. A sitemap with hreflang is fine if it says the same as the HTML. Two truths are worse than one.

After a URL change, take this with you. Hreflang to an old slug is worse than none. Crawl both languages. The bug is almost never the theory. It is the one blog post still pointing at /en/old-slug.

I also check that both pages share intent, not only the same slug pattern. NL “pricing” to EN “about” is not a pair. That is two URLs that happen to point at each other. Google may ignore that. Do it on ten landings and you have a sitemap full of gestures and no language pair.