hreflang is markup you can add to your web sites to help communicate which URL Google should show in the search results for localized versions of Google. So if you have a UK site and a Germany site, you can communicate to Google to show the co.uk version in Google UK and the .de version in Google Germany.

But John Mueller of Google said it won’t make your site rank better than it does without the hreflang. All it does is help Google know which URL to swap it out for based on the language or region of Google.

John Mueller said this on Friday in a hangout on Google+ at the 2:29 mark into the video. He said:

So it doesn’t seem it would rank any better, which I find interesting.

Here is the video embed so you can listen for yourself, it is the first question asked:

Forum discussion at Google+.