3.2% have pages with inconsistent language attributes

October 23, 2023 By 4in27 0

This issue shows pages with different language codes declared in the HTML language attribute and hreflang annotation for the URL. These are different systems, but both are used to say what language the page is in. If they don’t match, something is fishy and you should check which language the page is actually in. 2.5% of domains have more than one page referenced for the same language 2.5% of domains have more than one page referenced for the same language For an hreflang language or language and country combination, you should only have one page specified for each unique value. If you specify “en” for a page and use “en” again but say it’s a different page, then Google is going to have to choose one or the other. They can’t both be the correct version.

2.5% 3.2% haveof domains have the same page referenced for more than one language

In this case, pages were referenced for more than one language in hreflang annotations. For example, you may see category email list this issue if you reference the page in an hreflang tag that specifies the page is for English and another hreflang tag that says it’s for Spanish. You shouldn’t have two languages on the same page, so check which one is correct and remove the other one. Final thoughts A huge thanks and shoutout to my colleague, Oleksiy Golvoko, for helping me gather this data! I’m surprised the numbers weren’t worse in the study

Hreflang is3.2% have complex and hard to get right.

Here’s what Google’s John Mueller has to say about it. Want to see if your site has hreflang issues? Run it through Site Audit CE Leads or try it for free with Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. Hreflang is a topic I’m passionate about and one that I’ve written and presented many times, so I was happy to write this up. One of the first blog posts I made edits to when I joined Ahrefs was our hreflang guide. I’d recommend that if you want to learn more about hreflang and some of the nuances of it. If you have questions, message me on Twitter.