: Can a element's href attribute be relative? Can I use: <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="?l=en" /> to link pages with different languages for SEO (recommended for example by Google)?

@Ogunnowo487

Yes.

The definition of the href attribute for the link element says:


[…] must contain a valid non-empty URL potentially surrounded by spaces


This links to the definition of valid non-empty URL, which links to the definition of valid URL, which says that is has to be a URL that


conforms to the authoring conformance requirements in the URL standard


That URL standard is www.w3.org/TR/url/ (which is actually only a Working Draft from 2014), and this, of course, defines/allows relative URLs.

Or in other words (tl;dr): The href attribute is the same for a, area, and link.

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@Gretchen104

If possible do always use absolute links instead of relative ones.

Why?

Because relative links may cause crawl errors. Especially when it comes to alternate links you should make sure the bot finds exactly the URL you want it to crawl.

Further it is not a good idea to use parameters for language indication.

Please visit the following guides on multi language websites: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
And implementing hreflang: support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

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@Nickens628

Looks like it. This example comes from the HTML5 specs:


For example, the following link is a French translation that uses the
PDF format:

<link rel=alternate type=application/pdf hreflang=fr href=manual-fr>

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