Troubleshooting hreflang annotations in Webmaster Tools
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Monday, July 14, 2014
If you are targeting users in more than one country, chances are you already heard about
rel-alternate-hreflang.
If you haven't, in short, this annotation enables Google and other search engines to serve the
correct language or regional version of pages to searchers, which can lead to increased user
satisfaction.
Making sure the deployed annotations are usable by search engines can be rather difficult,
especially on sites with many pages, and site owners all around the world haven't been shy
telling us about this. Today we're releasing a feature that should make debugging
rel-alternate-hreflang annotations much easier.
The Language Targeting section in the
International Targeting
feature enables you to identify two of the most common issues with hreflang annotations:
Missing return links: annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If
page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be
interpreted correctly.
For each error of this kind we report where and when we detected them, as well as where the
return link is expected to be.
Incorrect hreflang values: The value of the hreflang attribute
must either be a language code in
ISO 639-1
format such as es, or a combination of language and country code such as
es-AR, where the country code is in
ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2
format.
In case our indexing systems detect language or country codes that are not in these formats,
we provide example URLs to help you fix them.
Additionally, we've moved the
geographic targeting
setting to this part of Webmaster Tools, so that you can find all information relevant to
international and multilingual targeting in the same place.
We hope you'll find this new feature useful and that it helps you to identify issues with the
rel-hreflang-implementation on your site. If you have comments or questions about the
feature, please post in our
Webmaster Help Forum.
[[["Easy to understand","easyToUnderstand","thumb-up"],["Solved my problem","solvedMyProblem","thumb-up"],["Other","otherUp","thumb-up"]],[["Missing the information I need","missingTheInformationINeed","thumb-down"],["Too complicated / too many steps","tooComplicatedTooManySteps","thumb-down"],["Out of date","outOfDate","thumb-down"],["Samples / code issue","samplesCodeIssue","thumb-down"],["Other","otherDown","thumb-down"]],[],[[["Google released a feature to help webmasters debug `rel-alternate-hreflang` annotations for international and multilingual sites."],["The feature helps identify missing return links and incorrect `hreflang` values, which are common errors with hreflang implementation."],["The International Targeting section in Google Webmaster Tools now includes geographic targeting settings, consolidating all relevant internationalization settings."],["Webmasters can find information on how to fix detected errors, such as using ISO 639-1 format for language codes and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format for country codes within `hreflang` values."]]],["The core update involves a new feature in the International Targeting section of Webmaster Tools, designed to simplify debugging `rel-alternate-hreflang` annotations. It identifies missing return links between pages and incorrect `hreflang` values using ISO standards. The feature reports where and when errors were detected and provides example URLs for corrections. Additionally, geographic targeting settings have been moved to this section, centralizing international and multilingual targeting information.\n"]]
