Question 22263 in SEO Question posted in
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Why these Canonical and Hreflang Tags Produce Errors? – SEO

I am working on a website that has Turkish, English, German and French versions. The tags in the head part of the Turkish main page are as follows:

<link rel=canonical href='https://www.example.com/tr'/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=tr href="https://www.example.com/tr/"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=en href="https://www.example.com/en/"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=x-default href="https://www.example.com/en"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=de href="https://www.example.com/de/"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=fr href="https://www.example.com/fr/"/>

These tags cause the “Pages with hreflang elements” and “Missing return links” errors when audited via SEO software.

The same tags for the French page are:

<link rel=canonical href="https://www.example.com/fr"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=tr href="https://www.example.com/tr"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=en href="https://www.example.com/en"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=x-default href="https://www.example.com/en"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=de href="https://www.example.com/de"/>
<link rel=alternate hreflang=fr href="https://www.example.com/fr"/>

There are links to every other language version on every page, for example on the French page:

<a href="https://www.example.com/tr" hreflang=tr>
<a href="https://www.example.com/en" hreflang=en>
<a href="https://www.example.com/de" hreflang=de>

Is there anything wrong in this structure?

Tags:

2

Answers


  1. Chosen as BEST ANSWER
    0

    I have found the issue: As the remove_quotes filter of mod_pagepeed module removed the quotes of the tags, tools could not read the rel and hreflang values.

    It works fine after disabling the filter.


  2. 0

    Using x-default wrong

    Your x-default should not point to your English page. Instead it should point to a page for users to choose their language or get redirected to the appropriate language. If you are going to use it, it should probably be <link rel=alternate hreflang=x-default href="https://www.example.com/"/>. See Introducing x-default hreflang for international landing pages  |  Google Developers

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