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XML sitemap

<xhtml:link>

An hreflang alternate for a URL, declared in the XHTML namespace — the only correct way to express language variants in a sitemap.

Each <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="…" href="…"/> names one language or regional variant of the enclosing <url>. The set has to be complete and reciprocal: every variant must list every other, itself included, or search engines discard the group.

It lives in the XHTML namespace, which the sitemap must declare on its root. Dropping that declaration during a refactor is how a whole hreflang set disappears silently — the elements remain in the file and mean nothing.

Format
XML sitemap
Namespace
XHTML
Parent
<url>
How many
Any number per <url>, one per variant including the URL itself.

What it contains

Nothing — this element holds a value rather than other elements. Its content is text, and the constraints below are what that text has to be.

Attributes

  • relrequiredAlways "alternate" in a sitemap.
  • hreflangrequiredA BCP 47 language tag, or x-default.
  • hrefrequiredThe absolute URL of that variant.

Cardinality and constraints

Any number per <url>, one per variant including the URL itself.

  • Requires xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" on the root element.
  • rel="alternate", plus hreflang and href attributes. It is always an empty element.
  • The set must be reciprocal and self-referential: each variant lists all of them, itself included.
  • hreflang values are language, or language-region: en, en-GB, x-default.

What our validator does

We do not check hreflang sets — the namespace check will flag a prefix that is used but never declared, which is the failure that actually happens.

We do not catch this one

The German variant is declared here but the English one is not, so the set is not reciprocal and search engines will drop it. Our sitemap checks do not model hreflang groups, and neither document below produces an issue.

Broken and fixed

Both documents below are well-formed XML — that is the point of this corpus — and both are run through the validator on every test run. The verdicts here are what it returned, not what we expect it to.

broken
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/"/>
  </url>
</urlset>
No issue reported. This defect passes our checks.
fixed
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"
        xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <url>
    <loc>https://example.com/</loc>
    <lastmod>2026-08-10</lastmod>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/"/>
    <xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/"/>
  </url>
</urlset>
No errors. Warnings may remain — a conforming feed can still be missing a self link — but nothing here is wrong.

Where it reaches

Related elements

All 34 elements

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