Site Health: Hreflang Audit
Overview
Hreflang is an extremely important part of Global SEO. Regular audits of hreflang for your site can help to avoid common mistakes that impact impressions and organic traffic for your site.
Background
The Hreflang Audit in Clarity Audits is designed to analyze and check for issues related to implementation in Hreflang on the page (On Page) as well as issues that can be found by crawling the Hreflang URLs (Off Page).
By default, Clarity Audits analyzes the hreflang on the page. Auditing for issues by crawling the hreflang urls can be enabled by checking the option for Hreflang Audit when settling up the crawl.
Learn more about hreflang, why it matters, and how to use it properly:
Hreflang Rules that the crawl check for: The below table contains a list of the On Page and Off Page issues that the crawler checks for. It also includes details on why the rule is a problem and what the recommended solution is.
| On Page | ||
| Rule | Severity | Problem it identifies and recommended solution |
| Missing Language entry | High | Why is it a problem? Google does not automatically derive the language from the country code. You must specify a language code. Solution: Ensure that all hreflang attributes that have the country attribute also have a language attribute. |
| Empty Hreflang URL | High | Why is it a Problem? Empty hreflang URLs are going to be shown as errors in Google Search Console. Solution: Ensure that the hreflang url is populated. |
| Hreflang url is invalid | High | Why is it a Problem? Empty hreflang URLs are going to be shown as errors in Google Search Console. Solution: Ensure that the hreflang url is a valid url. |
| Underscore Instead of Dash | High | Why is it a Problem? The specifications for hreflang indicate hypens, and not underscores to separate the language and the country. Solution: Ensure you are using underscores instead of hypens to separate language and country. For example: Use en-US and not en_US. |
| Invalid order of hreflang values | High | Why is it a problem? Google expects the language code to precede a country code. If the values in a hreflang attribute is in reverse order, it is not valid. Solution: Ensure the language code precedes the country code. |
| Invalid region in the hreflang attribute | High | Why is this a problem? Search Engines expect the region code in the hreflang attribute to be in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. If you use the wrong region code, it would not get picked up by Google. Solution: Ensure that the region code used is in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-2 |
| Invalid language in the hreflang attribute | High | Why is this a problem? Search Engines expect the region code in the hreflang attribute to be in ISO 639-1 format. If you use the wrong language code, it would not get picked up by Google. Solution: Ensure that the region code used is in ISO-639-1 format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes |
| Hreflang Using Relative links | High | Why is it a Problem? Alternate URLs must be fully-qualified, including the transport method (http/https). Relative URLs can be misinterpreted by Googlebot, so they might not be indexed. Solution: Ensure all urls are fully qualified URLs. |
| Hreflang with duplicate language/region combinations | High | Why is it a Problem? There should never be multiple entries for a single language/region combo.If more than one URL is specified for the same language and country, Googlebot will ignore all of them because there is no clear message about which page should be indexed for this language version. Solution: Ensure that their is only one url specified for the same language and country. |
| Hreflang with multiple defaults | Medium | Why is it a Problem? You should never have more than one x-default entry on a page since that sends a confusing message to Search Engines. Solution: Ensure that there is only one x-default entry per page. |
| Hreflang Present Outside <head> | Medium | Why is it a Problem? Hreflang should be implemented in the <head>. If the hreflang resides outside the <head>, it may not be crawled by Search Engines. Solution: Ensure that hreflang attributes reside in the <head> tag on the page. |
| Conflicting hreflang and rel=canonical | Medium | What is the Problem? Hreflang tags should be used in conjunction with the canonical tag. The canonical tag and the hreflang tag for each version of a page should both point to the same url. If the canonical url and hreflang urls confict the search engine may index the incorrect page. Solution: Ensure that the Hreflang and Canonical Tags are used together and do not point to different pages. |
| Hreflang Not Present | Low | Why is it a problem? The hreflang attribute tells Google which language and country you are targeting for a specific page. This allows the search engine to serve the page result to users searching in that specific language and country. If a site has pages that target multiple countries, having hreflang attributes set up is highly recommended. Solution: Ensure that the hreflang attribute is set up. |
| No self-referencing hreflang tag | Low | Why is it a problem? If a page does not contain a self-referencing hreflang in its set of hreflang attributes those attributes may be ignored or interpreted incorrectly. Solution: Ensure that the page has an hreflang attribute that points to itself. |
| Off Page Issues (Rules checked for based on crawling the Hreflang urls) | ||||
| Rule | Severity | Problem it identifies and Solution | ||
| Broken hreflang link | High | Why is it a Problem? If hreflang URL does not point to a valid live page, hreflang annotations may be ignored or not interpreted correctly. None of the hreflang annotations on a page should have a url that returns a 4XX or 5XX response. Solution: Ensure that all the hreflang annotations on the page return a 200 reponse. | ||
| Hreflang link points to redirected page | High | Why is it a Problem? If hreflang URL does not point to a valid live page, hreflang annotations may be ignored or not interpreted correctly. None of the hreflang annotations on a page should have a url that returns a 3XX response. Solution: Ensure that all the hreflang annotations on the page return a 200 response. | ||
| Hreflang Url Disallowed By Robots.txt | High | Why is it a Problem? If the hreflang url is disallowed in robots.txt, it will not get crawled by the Search Engines. Solution: Ensure that the hreflang url is not disallowed in the robots.txt and is indexable. | ||
| Hreflang Url Blocked By Robots meta Tag | High | Why is it a Problem? If the hreflang url is blocked by the Robots meta tag, it will not get crawled by the Search Engines. Solution: Ensure that the hreflang url is not blocked by the Robots Meta tag and is indexable. | ||
| Hreflang Url Blocked by X-Robots Header | High | Why is it a Problem? If the hreflang url is blocked by the X-Robots header, it will not get crawled by the Search Engines. Solution: Ensure that the hreflang url is not blocked by the X-Robots header and is indexable.. | ||
| Hreflang Url Not Indexable | High | Why is it a Problem? If the hreflang url is not indexable, it will not get crawled by the Search Engines. Solution: Ensure that the hreflang url is indexable. | ||
| Return Tag Errors | High | Why is it a Problem? Every alternate language/locale URL of a page should, itself, include a link back to the first page. If the hreflang annotations do not cross-reference each other they will cause "Return Tag Errors" which can be found within Google Search Console under the International Targeting tab. Solution: Ensure that every alternate language/region combination includes a link back to the first page. | ||
Hreflang Audit Features
To run an hreflang audit, in the Advanced Settings when setting up a new site audit, check the box for HREFLANG Crawl.
Enabling the Hreflang Crawl option would take longer for the crawl to finish since it involves crawling the Hreflang Urls
Viewing Results
Once the crawl completes, there are two places where you can see insights related to hreflang
1) Clarity Audit Reports Page
This is an overall report of the crawl and contains a list of all issues detected sorted by highest to Lowest number of urls. Any issues related to Hreflang that were found in the crawl along with the count of issues that triggered the issue would be shown in the table here.
2) Hreflang Audit Tab in Site Health
The Hreflang Audit tab shows all key findings based on the Hreflang for your crawl. It contains information summarized in summary boxes followed by URL level details in the table. Alternate URLs will be seen in this report.
Hreflang Charts
Hreflang: This shows the number of pages found in the crawl that had hreflang implemented.
Hreflang Attributes: The contains the top 10 hreflang attributes detected. Clicking on any of the attributes, filters the page by that attribute.
Unique Issues Count: This chart contains the count of unique On Page and Off Page issues found in the crawl.
On Page Issues: These are the count of unique issues issues found while analyzing the source of the page.
Off Page Issues: These are the issues found while crawling and analyzing the hreflang url. Off Page issues only populate, if the Hreflang audit option is selected while setting up the crawl.
Clicking on the count of issues opens a side panel that contains the details of the issues that were found along with the number of urls found with the issue. Clicking on an issue adds it a filter to the page. (Screenshot below for illustration)
Hreflang table
Page: Displays the URL of the crawled page.
Tags Found: Displays the count of Hreflang tags found on the page. Select the number to display the details.(Screenshot below)
X-Default: Displays Yes or No, depending on if a X-Default meta data was found for the page.
Self-Reference Language: Displays Yes or No, depending on if a self-referencing language meta data was found for the page.
On Page Issues: Displays the count of issues found on the page with the hreflang tags. Select the number to display the issues found for the page.
Off Page Issues: Displays the count of issues found while crawling and validating the hreflang links. Select the number to display the issues found for the page.
Tag Found Side Panel
On Page Issues Side Panel
Off Page Issues Side Panel
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