Hreflang Study and Interesting Issues - Brighton SEO 2023 Patrick Stox

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@patrickstox #brightonseo The most common hreflang issues across 374,756 domains Patrick Stox Ahrefs Speakerdeck.com/patrickstox @patrickstox

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Who Is Patrick Stox? Product Advisor & Technical SEO @ Ahrefs Writing Ahrefs SEO book Ahrefs blog SEO Chapter of the Web Almanac 2021 Technical Review Editor of the Art of SEO 4th edition Community Founded a Technical SEO slack group /r/TechSEO moderator on Reddit Organize Raleigh SEO Meetup, Raleigh SEO Conference, Beer & SEO Defined the role of SEO for the US Department of Labor

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Hreflang Is Hard TBH hreflang is one of the most complex aspects of SEO (if not the most complex one). Feels as easy as a meta-tag, but it gets really hard quickly. John Mueller - Google

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 67% Of Domains Have Hreflang Issues At least one hreflang issue

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Pages missing x-default Pages missing self-referencing hreflang tags Hreflang tags reference redirected or broken pages Pages missing reciprocal tags Hreflang tags pointing to non-canonical URLs Pages with incorrect hreflang values Pages with inconsistent hreflang values More than on page referenced for the same language The same page referenced for more than one language Top Hreflang Issues

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 56.3% of Domains Have Pages Missing X-Default Annotations Missing x-default

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X-default Is Not Required

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@patrickstox #brightonseo It Works By Most Specific Match 1. Language-country 2. Language 3. X-default

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 18% Of Domains Have Pages Missing Self-Referencing Hreflang Tags Missing self-referencing hreflang tags

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Self-Referencing Hreflang Tags Are Not Required

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 16.9% of Domains Have Hreflang Tags Referencing Redirected Or Broken Pages Hreflang tags reference redirected or broken pages

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 15.3% Of Domains Have Pages Missing Reciprocal Hreflang Tags Missing reciprocal hreflang tags

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Hreflang Tags Work In Pairs

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@patrickstox #brightonseo They Form An Hreflang Cluster

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Block Pages With Robots.txt

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Hreflang + Duplicate Pages – Signals Consolidate

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Ranking Is Based On The Indexed URL When someone searches:

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Versions Swap During Re-Ranking For an English speaker in the UK: Ranking based on en-us en-gb shown in SERPs

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Pages Don’t Swap When Tags Are Broken For an English speaker in the UK: Ranking based on en-us en-us shown in SERPs

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Non-Duplicate Pages Use Their Own Signals

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Some SEOs Say You Don’t Need Hreflang For Different Languages…

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Branded - English

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Branded - Spanish

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Branded - French

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Same Word - English

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Same Word - Spanish

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Same Word - French

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 8% Of Domains Have Hreflang Tags Pointing To Non-Canonical URLs Hreflang tags pointing to non-canonical URLs

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Hreflang Is A Canonicalization Signal, 1 of ~20 Hreflang URLs Canonical link element Sitemap URLs Redirects & More https://ahrefs.com/blog/canonicalization/

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 4.6% Of Domains Have Pages With Incorrect Hreflang Values Incorrect hreflang values

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 2 Letter Codes Language (ISO 639-1) Country (ISO 3166-1)

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Country Code Instead Of Language Code jp instead of ja

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Typos js instead of ja

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Region Codes la is Laos, not Latin America

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Three Letter Codes gbr instead of gb

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@patrickstox #brightonseo ✓ en-uk Instead Of en-gb “uk” is specially reserved

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@patrickstox #brightonseo No Error For It When This Report Existed

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@patrickstox #brightonseo The Report Is Gone Now

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 3.2% Of Domains Have Pages With Inconsistent Language Attributes Inconsistent language attributes

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 2.5% Of Domains Have More Than One Page Referenced For The Same Language More than one page referenced for the same language

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X More Than One Page Referenced For The Same Language en > Page en > Page 2

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@patrickstox #brightonseo 2.5% Of Domains Have The Same Page Referenced For More Than One Language Same page referenced for more than one language

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X The Same Page Referenced For More Than One Language en > Page 1 de > Page 1

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@patrickstox #brightonseo What Else You Can Get Away With

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@patrickstox #brightonseo ✓ Underscore Instead Of Dash en_gb instead of en-gb

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@patrickstox #brightonseo ✓ Relative URLs Instead Of Absolute /page1 instead of https://domain.com/page1

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Other Things To Check

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Multiple Language Versions On The Same Page URL1 – English Content URL1 – Spanish Content URL1 – German Content

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Automated Redirects Are Generally A Bad Idea Logic: Cookies, IP, Browser Language

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Use It This Way Instead

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Don’t Make Those Too Big

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@patrickstox #brightonseo ✓ Encoded Characters %20 UTF-8 is fine with Google

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Encoded Characters %20 Not all parts of your tech stack may support it

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Break

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@patrickstox #brightonseo X Noindex The pages need to be indexed

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Troubleshooting This is gone, now what?

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Traditional Site Audit Scheduled crawls

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Constant Crawl + Alerts Finds issues faster

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Regression Tests Tests code changes

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@patrickstox #brightonseo First Of It’s Kind

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@patrickstox #brightonseo Wrong Pages Might Show Even If Your Setup Is Right

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@patrickstox #brightonseo What Would Patrick Do? (WWPD)

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@patrickstox #brightonseo I Prefer One Page Per Language 1. Fewer, stronger pages 2. Dynamic personalization

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@patrickstox #brightonseo