Bilingual websites in Szeklerland: 57% of Harghita company websites offer several languages, but often without hreflang

In Szeklerland the audience expects a bilingual website: many local customers search in Hungarian, while authorities, partners and the rest of the country use Romanian. In the eighth part of the series on the websites of 100 companies in Harghita County, I measured which language company websites speak and whether the multilingual ones signal this correctly to search engines.

How I measured

The measurement was taken on 27 September 2026. The sample: the 50 largest companies in Harghita County from the Termene 2025 revenue ranking, and 50 small businesses from different sectors. Of the 81 working websites, the check ran without errors on 77, and the numbers refer to those. I loaded each homepage in a Playwright-based browser and looked at three things:

• the main language of the text, by counting typical Hungarian, Romanian and English words and accented letters;
• the language offer: hreflang markup in the page head, or a language switcher link (such as "HU", "RO", "Magyar", "Română", or a URL ending in /hu/ or /ro/);
• the html lang attribute, i.e. what language the page declares itself to be.

Limits: the main language comes from a simple word count, which was inconclusive on 2 sites. A switcher marked only with a flag and no text may not have been detected, so the number of multilingual sites is more of a lower bound. I checked only the homepage. The small-business half contains only companies with a working website.

What language does the homepage speak?

• 52 sites are mainly in Romanian, 18 in Hungarian, 5 in English, and 2 could not be decided.
• Among large companies, 21 of 27 homepages are in Romanian, 3 in Hungarian and 3 in English.
• Among small businesses, of 50: 31 in Romanian, 15 in Hungarian, 2 in English.
• Both Hungarian and Romanian text appears in meaningful amounts on 6 homepages, all of them small businesses.

So in a county with a Hungarian majority, the homepages of large companies are almost all in Romanian. That is not necessarily a mistake: many of them sell to the national market. For smaller companies that live on local customers, though, a Hungarian homepage or a clearly visible Hungarian version speaks directly to the buyer.

Bilingual website: how many offer more than one language

• 44 sites (57%) offer more than one language: 18 of 27 (67%) large companies and 26 of 50 (52%) small businesses.
• 30 sites (39%) have hreflang markup.
• 25 sites (32%) have hreflang for both Hungarian and Romanian.

Without hreflang, Google has to guess

Hreflang markup tells search engines which page is the Hungarian, Romanian or English version of another. Without it, someone searching in Hungarian may get the Romanian page in the results, or the two language versions may compete with each other.

• Of the 44 multilingual sites, 15 (34%) have no hreflang: 8 of 18 large companies and 7 of 26 small businesses.
• Of the 30 sites with hreflang, 13 (43%) also have x-default, the rest do not. x-default marks the version to show visitors whose language is not in the list.

On a WordPress site, the translation plugin (Polylang or WPML, for example) usually generates hreflang automatically, as long as the language versions are linked to each other. A missing hreflang often means the translations were built as separate, unlinked pages.

The wrong declared language: Romanian sites that claim to be English

The html lang attribute tells browsers and screen readers which language the page is in.

• Where both the text language and the attribute could be determined (71 sites), 12 (17%) do not match: 9 sites with Romanian text and 3 with Hungarian text declare themselves English (en).
• 4 sites (5%) have no html lang attribute at all.

The cause is almost always a default setting that nobody changed, in the theme or in the WordPress language settings. The result: screen readers read Romanian or Hungarian text with English pronunciation, the browser offers a native speaker a translation, and search engines get a conflicting signal. It is also an accessibility error, and fixing it takes one setting.

A five-minute self-check

• In the page source (Ctrl+U), near the top, what does <html lang="…"> say? Does it match the language of the site?
• Search for hreflang. Is every language version listed, and is there an x-default?
• Does the language switcher take you to the same page in the other language, or always back to the homepage?
• Do the Hungarian and Romanian versions have separate URLs, so that Google can index both?

I wrote about when each language is worth it for a local business in the article on multilingual websites. If you want me to check your website, send me the address. On the websites I build, the Hungarian, Romanian and English versions are linked to each other with hreflang and x-default; you can see how I work on the company websites page.