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In practice
Hreflang solves one problem: when a site has several language or regional versions of the same page, it tells search engines which version belongs to which audience, preventing a German buyer from landing on the English page and duplicate versions from competing with each other. It does not solve the problem international campaigns exist for: hreflang is a serving instruction, not an authority transfer — the German page does not inherit the links the English page earned, and no annotation will make a translated page rank in a market where no local publisher has ever mentioned it.
The implementation details that matter: hreflang works in clusters (every version points at every other version, including itself), returns absolute URLs, uses correct language and region codes, and — because search engines ignore inconsistent implementations — matches reality: the sitemap, the canonical tags and the self-referencing hreflang must all agree. The common failures are silent: annotations added to only some versions, recycled templates pointing at the wrong alternates, or hreflang placed on pages that are redirects — all of which quietly disable the signal.
The sequencing rule for international link building follows from what hreflang cannot do: localised pages go live and get verified first (indexable, correctly annotated), then the market’s own publishers start pointing at them. A link from a German publication to the German URL serves readers in that market and confirms the page’s local existence; the same link to the English homepage would serve nobody and confirm nothing.
See also: International SEO vs international links, Localisation of content for link markets, Crawling, indexing and link discovery.
Checklist: International Link Campaign.
Related service: International links.
