This means that the URL in question has one or more outgoing hreflang annotation that is invalid (e.g. invalid language or region code).
Hreflang annotations include an attribute value that identifies the language, and optionally the region of an alternate URL.
For example, the value "en-gb" identifies English (en) as the language and Great Britain (gb) as the region.
In order to be considered valid, and recognised by search engines, the attribute value must conform to certain guidelines:
If hreflang does not conform to any of the above, it will not be recognised by search engines.
This Hint will trigger for any URL which has at least one outgoing hreflang annotation that is invalid.
Note: This Hint is very similar to another Hint: Invalid incoming hreflang annotations. The difference being that this Hint is analysing the page with hreflang on (i.e. outgoing hreflang) whereas the other Hint is analysing the target page of a hreflang annotationn (i.e. incoming hreflang).
Consider the URL: https://example.com/fr/page-a/
The Hint would trigger for this URL if it had invalid outgoing hreflang;
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/en/page-a/" hreflang="en-uk" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/de/page-a/" hreflang="de-de" />
(where "en-uk" is invalid - it should be "en-gb")
This Hint is marked 'Critical' as it represents a fundamentally breaking issue, which may have a serious adverse impact upon organic search traffic. It is strongly recommended that Critical issues are dealt with as a matter of high priority.
Invalid hreflang cannot be ignored if you want search engines to serve the correct localised content in different regions.
If you have invalid hreflang, the first task is to understand why it is invalid - which of the 5 guidelines above was broken? Once you understand this, you can roll out a fix on the website, across all affected URLs.
Although this issue triggered a Hint, the best place to check for invalid hreflang in Sitebulb is in the 'Hreflang Geotargeting' tab in the International section.
The column marked 'Valid' will show you which hreglang is invalid, and the other columns will show you other datapoints, such as the number of URLs affected.
In this case there seems to be an error with 2 of the hreflang values, across basically all translated pages. The error, in this case, is:
Both cn (China) and cz (Czech Republic) are region codes, and are not valid language codes. China has a range of languages (none of which use the symbol 'cn'), and Czech language is denoted by 'cs'. You can use this list of country and language codes to check.
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