SEO finding
The hreflang annotations of a page are incomplete or point at the wrong URL
SEO Warning Severity: Medium
Part of the audit Hreflang and language versions. Finding id: seo.hreflangProblems.
What it costs you
When hreflang is broken, search engines show the wrong language or country version to visitors, or treat the versions as duplicates of each other.
What to do
On every language version list all versions, itself included, with valid codes and with the final, canonical address of each.
What it checks
- Invalid language or region code
- Page missing from its own language list
- Other language page does not link back
- Language version broken or redirected
- Language version not its preferred address
- No default language version
- Language list conflicts with page language
- Same language listed twice
How to fix it
Print the same complete set on every version
- Generate the set from one list of translations per page, so every version prints the same lines.
- Use the address each version names as its own canonical, answering 200 without a redirect.
- Declare each language and region code once.
- Make the html lang attribute of each version match its hreflang code.
How to check: Recrawl all language versions and run this rule again.
A real case
Researchers at Ahrefs checked 374,756 domains that use hreflang and found that 67% had at least one issue, among them 16.9% with links to redirected or broken URLs and 15.3% with a missing return tag.