6 not unusual Hreflang Tag errors That Sabotage Your worldwide seo

Proper hreflang tags are crucial to the international success of SEO if you run your business multiple domains targeting different languages ​​or regions.

If hreflang tags are missing or misused, you damage your SEO.

I first experienced this frustration many years ago when I was managing SEO at a client’s eight Shopify stores.

Without the proper hreflang labels, I’ve seen these stores cannibalize each other’s SEO efforts in their local markets.

Since then, I’ve evaluated hreflang tags on hundreds of e-commerce stores and found six common recurring mistakes.

And let’s be clear. This is not a unique problem for Shopify.

If you run multi-regional stores from any e-commerce platform, you may make any of these mistakes.

Without the right directive, Google will not know that the best version is to show the user based on their location.

However, Shopify presents a unique problem, as there is no way to link different products, collections, pages, and products in multiple stores to create accurate hreflang tags unless you use custom hreflang tags Shopify application.

Some stores create solutions for their hreflang tags by redirecting to their translated versions of URLs.

This can be difficult to manage and leads to broken conversion chains due to a poor user experience.

Don’t forget to mention the negative impact on your SEO.

Why are Hreflang tags key to international SEO?

Hreflang label is a piece of code that signals to search engines which version of your store to show the user based on their language and geographic location.

When you run multiple e-commerce accounts under the same brand, you can customize your native language URLs.

This is recommended for SEO best practiceas you can better target keywords in your native language in your URLs and optimize the page accordingly.

With the correct hreflang label implementationyour store will send signals to Google to index and display the appropriate version based on the user’s location and / or language.

Improvements in the user experience and reducing source code conflicts affect SEO.

For example, if the user is shown the correct version, you’re more likely to attract links to your geographic landing page. This can help reduce one-page traffic and improve conversions.

What does the correct Hreflang label look like?

Before we jump in common mistakeslet’s look at the benefits of using hrelflang tags correctly.

Let’s say you own a shoe store that we’ll call a “Good Shoe Store”.

You are currently managing two domains; one for target customers in the US (.com domain) and the other for German customers (.de domain).

It makes sense to show the .com version to users in the US, and the .de version of the store you translated into German to users in Germany.

In addition, you translated the German store and used custom URLs in German to target your native language keywords.

Great SEO work!

The correct hreflang tags for the ‘Shoe’ collection page would look like this for the .com store:

<link rel="alternate" href="https://goodshoeshop.com/collections/shoes" hreflang="x-default">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://goodshoeshop.com/collections/shoes" hreflang="en" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://goodshoeshop.de/collections/schuhe" hreflang="de" />

These hreflang tags notify Google when a customer is based in Germany to display the .de version of your store.

The “x-default” attribute signals to Google to display this default version when the user’s location or language is not specified or targeted in the hreflang tag.

Without these hreflang tags, users in Germany can get the .com version simply because it is better for some English keywords.

As a result, the page will display US dollar prices, shipping information to the US, and no custom language.

Can you imagine the difference in customer experience?

This ability to show customers the correct version of your store based on their location is the reason why hreflang tags are important to your international SEO.

Here are the six most common hreflang label errors we’ve come across that cause stores to repel customers and lose sales.

1. No translations of custom URLs

If you have multiple domains, it is important that you show the user your store in their native language and that you have custom URL translations.

It is up to you whether you do these translations manually or use a translation application.

What matters here is how you manage these translations in your hreflang tags.

Here is an example from Toby Wagons.

Although Toby Wagons uses hreflang tags, they are all in English.

At face value, this may not seem like much, but how many French customers in France use English search queries such as “Spare Parts” as opposed to French search queries?

What does this mean for local SEO in a French store?

Is it not very likely that the .com store will overtake the French store according to English keywords when you would like the .fr domain to be ranked high in France?

If you don’t use custom URLs in your native language, you’re missing out on valuable SEO juice.

This serves your local customers better, while targeting more relevant keywords for that region.
For example, Toby Wagons uses “pièces de rechange” as the collection name for “Spare Part” in his French store.

SEO best practices would require you to repeat this in the URL to target these keywords and provide a more consistent and geographically relevant user experience.

Before:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://tobywagons.com/collections/spare-parts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://tobywagons.fr/collections/spare-parts" />

After:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="http://tobywagons.com/collections/spare-parts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="http://tobywagons.fr/collections/pieces-de-rechange" />

Each individual store must use custom URLs translated into the local language.

These translated URLs must then be used in hreflang tags.

2. No cross-reference between shops

Big, multinational brands like Allbirds are not infallible.

They have several stores that cater to different geo-regions such as Australia, Canada, China, Japan, etc.

However, hreflang labels do not refer to their other stores.

The consequence?

These in-store stores do not tolerate valuable SEO juice.

3. Incorrect mapping of URLs

In the case of Kids Ride Shotgun, they use hreflang tags between their eight domains.

However, they are misplaced.

When you go to the collection page, the hreflang tag points to the home page of each store and not to the equivalent collection page for that store.

This tells search engines that the home page is the most relevant version of this page for all pages.

From an SEO standpoint, this is utterly wrong.

Each collection page must be mapped to the corresponding collection page in other stores.

Also, each side of the product must have an equivalent side of the product to which it can be mapped into hreflang tags.

4. Improper use of Hreflang tag domains

It is very important that you use the correct version of your domain in hreflang tags.

For example, Vovox has two domains in two separate Shopify accounts:

https://vovox.com
in
https://vovox.ch

Their hreflang tags do not use public versions of domains, but Shopify administrative domains.

This undoubtedly causes confusion and can affect their SEO.

Always use a public domain address in your hreflang tags.

They also do not use custom URLs. The .com store version uses .ch translations.

For example: https://vovox.com/collections/instrumentenkabel

English URLs must be used in the English store and mapped to other languages ​​in hreflang tags.

5. Hreflang signs indicate diversion

As with any internal link on your site, SEO best practices require the use of the correct version of the link and not a 301 redirect.

There’s nothing wrong with redirects, though; exist in order to communicate with search engines that the URL has moved.

If there is a correct or new version of the URL, it is best practice to use the correct target link for internal links on the page on your site.

This saves page loading time and provides a clearer directive for search engines.

In this case, redirected URLs were used in the hreflang tags.

Although we are on .com, the URL used in the hreflang tag uses the German version of the collection page.

While reviewing other collections, I found a lot Hreflang URLs end as 404 errors.

They tried to solve this with 301 redirects.

This is an awkward way to manage hreflang tags between different stores and can result in all sorts of broken connections. 301 can also weaken your PageRank if used incorrectly.

6. Hreflang marks indicate 404 pages

Although this last point is not a direct hreflang error, it is an SEO error caused by hreflang restrictions in Shopify or in the case of other platforms where a non-existent link was used.

The problem is when a store has a hreflang tag that points to the equivalent side of another store but lands with a 404 error.

This happens because the URL is often translated into the native language, but the hreflang tag uses the same English version.

Below is an example from Luvela.

When I looked at the hreflang tags on the .com collection page, the .de version of that collection took me straight to 404 pages.

The hreflang tags use English URLs for the .com and .de versions, although they have a German version of https://www.luvele.de/collections/mixer.

Before:
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.luvele.com.au/collections/blenders" hreflang="en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.luvele.de/collections/blenders" hreflang="en-de" />

The correct hreflang tag should indicate a German translation of the collection page.

<link rel="alternate" href=" https://www.luvele.de/collections/mixer" hreflang="en-de" />

You can start to imagine the number of 404 errors that occur when you multiply this by the number of stores you manage and the number of collections and product pages!

Other SEO Considerations and Best Practices for Hreflang Tags

Use the self-reference Hreflang

Without a self-referring hreflang tag, attributes may be ignored or misinterpreted.

This can cause a conflict with another source code.

The page to which it refers must contain the self-referring hreflang tag.

Avoid mixing canonical labels and Hreflang labels

The canonical tag signals to search engines which version of the URL (where the content is the same) to index to avoid duplicate content.

On the other hand, the hreflang tag is a signal to search engines to display the correct version of the URL based on the user’s language or region (and where the content may differ slightly to compensate for translation differences or region / language-specific information). .

This can easily go wrong when you start cross-referencing canonical labels in hreflang labels between stores.

Canonical tags should only be used in one version of your store.

You can avoid sending misleading signals to Google by using only the same URL that refers to itself in the attributes of the hreflang tag.

Use the correct region and language attributes

Be sure to use the correct country and language code attributes.

Check twice ISO 639-1 format for language codes to ensure that you are using it correctly. You will need to use to target a specific region ISO 3166-1 alpha 2 format.

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