Why translation plugins quietly break multilingual SEO on the Costa Blanca, and the four-line fix that puts each language in front of the right buyer.
On a coast where buyers arrive from the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and Spain itself, running four languages is normal. Running them so search engines understand them is not.
The failure we find most often
A site has Spanish, English, German and Dutch versions. Every page carries the same hreflang
tags — or none at all — so Google treats the four versions as duplicates of one page and picks
whichever it likes. A German buyer searching in German lands on the English page, decides the
agency does not speak German, and leaves.
Nobody notices, because analytics shows the traffic arriving. It just converts badly.
What correct looks like
Every version of a page declares every other version, including itself, and the set is reciprocal — if the English page points at the German one, the German page must point back.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/services/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/leistungen/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="https://example.com/nl/diensten/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://example.com/es/servicios/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/" />x-default matters more here than most places: it is what a Swedish or Norwegian visitor gets
when you have no page in their language, and leaving it out sends them somewhere arbitrary.
Why plugins get it wrong
Automatic translation plugins generate a language switcher and, often, a ?lang=de parameter
rather than a real URL. Parameters are a weak signal, the machine translation reads as machine
translation, and the tags are frequently emitted on the template rather than per page — so every
page claims to be the alternate of the homepage.
A real multilingual setup has one URL per language per page, human-written text for at least the pages that sell, and its own sitemap per language.
The part that is not technical
Translating your site does not translate your local SEO. A German-language page still needs to mention the towns German buyers search — Dénia, Jávea, Calpe, Altea — and the Dutch page needs its own set. Same architecture, different content, or the pages compete with each other for the wrong queries.
Checking your own site
Open any page in two languages and view source. If the hreflang block is identical on both,
missing, or points only at the homepage, that is the bug. It is an afternoon to fix on a normal
site, and it usually moves the non-English languages before the month is out.