Over 67% of Domains Using Hreflang Have Issues (Study of 374,756 Domains)

We ran the largest hreflang study ever, nearly 10X larger than any other study. In total, we looked at issues on 374,756 different domains that used hreflang tags. Our findings show that 67% of them have at least oneissue.

Let’s look at the most common issues you should actually careabout.

Setting an x-default is not required. But it is recommended if you need a fallback page for users whose language settings don’t match any of your localized versions.

Hreflang works by the most specific match. Language+country is more specific than just language, which is more specific than x-default. X-default mostly serves as a backup or global default page, where you want to send people.

Self-referencing hreflang tags are included in the guidelines. But they’re really more like a best practice and not actually required.

In the old days of hreflang, before the systems and plugins handled it, having a missing self-referencing tag meant that when you copied the tags to other pages, at least one of the connections would be broken. This is less likely to happen on modern websites, so it’s not as big of anissue.

If you link to an incorrect URL, then the tags are broken and pages can’t swap properly in the search results. They work in pairs to form a cluster of pages. This is what an hreflang cluster lookslike.

If the broken...