A multilingual site is several language versions of one domain or different domains for different countries. The link strategy for such a site does not work the same as for a regular monolingual site: some questions do not arise at all, and some are specific only to international projects. Some of the conclusions below are confirmed by Google's official position, some are established practices of SEO specialists without direct official confirmation; where it is important, it is indicated separately.
How Link Equity is Distributed Among Language Versions
The main misconception: that hreflang itself "transfers" link equity between versions, as canonical does. This is not the case, and it has been officially confirmed: in Google's documentation on managing multi-regional sites, hreflang is described as a way to show the correct language version to the right audience, not as a mechanism for consolidating link signals — canonical handles this.
According to SEO specialists' observations (Google has not published strict documentary confirmation of this particular mechanism), if all language versions live on the same domain, in subfolders /en/, /de/, /kz/, incoming links to any of them strengthen the overall domain authority, because the search engine considers subfolders as part of one site. Google (through John Mueller) confirmed that it is technically capable of working equally well with subdomains and subfolders, but in practice, interlinking and authority remain more cohesive with a subfolder structure.
Here it's more straightforward: if versions live on separate domains (site.de instead of site.com/de/), each domain has its own, independent link profile — this is a basic fact about how separate domains work, not a specificity of multilingual websites. The authority of one version is not automatically transferred to another. This is one of the practical arguments in favor of subfolders when choosing a URL structure.
Internal Linking: How to Connect Language Versions
Recommended practice, symmetry rule: if a page in Russian links to an article, it should have a translated counterpart in all other languages of the site, and the translated pages should link to each other through their own internal links, and not just through the language switcher in the header. This is not directly documented as an official Google recommendation, but it logically follows from how the search engine determines the completeness and coherence of a language version.
Three things to check in multilingual website linking:
- The language switcher leads to the equivalent of the current page, not to the main page of another language version. A user reading an article about hreflang in Russian should land on an article about hreflang in English, not on the English homepage.
- Within the article, links to related materials lead to translated versions of those materials, not back to Russian content. Otherwise, the search engine sees links to Russian URLs on the English page, which confuses the signal about the language of the section.
- Cross-language navigation goes through hreflang in the head, not through links in the body of the text: hreflang is a Google-confirmed mechanism for such navigation, and links in the text are an additional, not the main, channel for connecting versions.
If a site has the logic of "pillar article plus several narrower materials on the topic," it should be repeated in each language version: the pillar page links to cluster pages, and cluster pages link to each other and back to the pillar. Different depths of internal linking in different language versions are a probable reason why the English version of the site ranks worse than the Russian one with the same translation quality: there are no direct studies specifically on multilingual sites, but Google describes the general principle of the influence of link depth on indexing and ranking in its crawling documentation.
External Links: In What Language and From Where to Get Them
The principle of relevance works here, not the habit of getting links from wherever possible. It is believed that for the English version of the site, links from English-language platforms are needed, for the German version - from German, and so on, although there is no separate study specifically about the language of the referring domain on multilingual sites. Google's general principle is confirmed: thematic and contextual relevance of the referring domain is one of the signals when evaluating a page.
Practical conclusions:
- A link from a Russian-language forum to an English page of the site, presumably, works weaker than the same link to an English platform, because it does not confirm relevance for an English-speaking audience.
- Anchor text should be in the language of the page it links to and comply with the norms of that language — this is a direct consequence of Google's general recommendation for natural anchor text. A direct translation of an anchor from Russian to English often looks unnatural due to different word order and frequency of phrasing.
- There is no need to chase quantity: one link from an authoritative industry platform in the target language weighs more than a dozen links from random directories.
If resources are only sufficient for one language version, it is logical to start with the one that already has traffic or leads (for example, according to analytics data), rather than spreading the budget for links across all languages simultaneously.
Does a new regional domain inherit the link juice of the main website?
A common question when launching a new regional domain, for example, a separate site.de instead of a /de/ subfolder on an existing domain: will it inherit the main site's equity via hreflang?
No: this follows from two already confirmed facts above — hreflang does not transfer equity (canonical does), and separate domains have independent link profiles. A direct statement from Google specifically about this combination has not been published, but the conclusion is a logical consequence, not speculation. A new regional domain effectively starts its link history from scratch, even if the content is identical to the main site and hreflang is correctly configured from day one.
This is a separate argument in favor of subfolders instead of separate domains for new language versions: a site in a subfolder immediately benefits from the existing authority of the main domain, whereas a new domain needs to be promoted with links separately.
Link Checklist for a Multilingual Website
Setting up a multilingual website and unsure about the link structure?
Multify creates language versions in subfolders with correct hreflang and a language switcher to the right page, without manual linking setup.