A multilingual website consists of several language versions of one domain or different domains for different countries. The link building strategy for such a website does not work the same way as for a regular monolingual one: some issues do not arise at all, while others are specific only to international projects. Some of the conclusions below are confirmed by Google's official position, while others are established practices of SEO specialists without direct official confirmation; where it is important, this 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 is officially confirmed: in Google's documentation on managing multi-regional websites, hreflang is described as a way to show the right language version to the right audience, and 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 one 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 website. Google (represented by John Mueller) confirmed that it is technically capable of working with subdomains and subfolders equally well, but in practice, internal linking and authority remain more cohesive with a subfolder structure.
Here it is more unambiguous: 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, and 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 homepage of another language version. A user reading an article about hreflang in Russian should be directed to the article about hreflang in English, not to the English homepage.
- Within the article, links to related materials lead to translated versions of these materials, and 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 primary, channel for connecting versions.
If a site has a logic of "pillar article plus several narrower materials on the topic," it should be replicated in each language version: the pillar page links to cluster pages, and cluster pages link to each other and back to the pillar. Different linking depths in different language versions are a probable reason why the English version of a site ranks worse than the Russian one, even with the same translation quality: there are no direct studies specifically on multilingual sites, but Google describes the general principle of how link depth affects indexing and ranking in its crawling documentation.
External Links: What Language and Where to Get Them From
Here, the principle of relevance applies, not the habit of getting links from wherever possible. It is believed that for the English version of a site, links from English-language platforms are needed, for the German version—from German ones, and so on, although there is no separate study specifically on the language of the linking domain on multilingual sites. The general principle, however, is confirmed by Google: the thematic and contextual relevance of the linking domain is one of the signals when evaluating a page.
Practical conclusions:
- A link from a Russian-language forum to an English page of a website presumably works less effectively 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 conform to 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.
- Don't 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's logical to start with the one that already has traffic or leads (e.g., according to analytics data), rather than spreading the budget on links for all languages simultaneously.
Does a new regional domain inherit the link equity of the main site?
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 through hreflang?
No: this follows from two already confirmed facts above — hreflang does not transfer weight (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 configured correctly 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
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to build the same number of links for each language version?
No, if the versions are in subfolders of the same domain: then all versions benefit from the common domain authority. If the versions are on different domains, a link profile will have to be built separately for each domain.
Can I use the same anchor text in different languages?
Technically, yes, but it weakens the relevance signal. Anchor text should be adapted to the language and formulation norms of the target audience, not translated literally.
What is more important for multilingual SEO: internal linking or external links?
Internal linking is mandatory and costs nothing but time to set up: without it, the search engine has a harder time understanding the connection between versions. External links are the next step, once the internal structure is already set up correctly.
Does Multify affect the website's linking strategy?
Multify, as a proxy translation, creates language versions in subfolders of the same domain and automatically sets hreflang and a language switcher to analogous pages, meaning it handles the technical part of internal linking. External links for each language version still need to be built separately.