Best Practices Archives

June 9, 2021

How to Fix HREFLang No Return Tags Errors

MAY 20, 2016 BY BILL HUNT Updated: June 15, 2021 HREFLang No Return tags errors are the most common errors given by Google for HREFLang. A no return tag error simply means that one or more of your pages does nothave a recprical link back. These errors are primarily caused […]

May 20, 2021

Hreflang Challenges for International SEO

HREFLang has been said to be one of the most complex tasks in SEO. HREFlang itself is not the problem but the complexities of the sites where it is being implemented. The following are four examples of hidden challenges international SEO professionals may encounter during hreflang implementation – and how […]

April 6, 2021

Make a Business Case for HrefLang Implementation

While using hreflang on a multinational website seems like a no brainer many are often faced with the need to convince management to allocate budget and/or developer resources for hreflang Implementation? We suggest the following steps to develop a business case for hreflang. The purpose of any business case is […]

June 17, 2020

Leveraging OnCrawl to Eliminate URL Source Gaps

One of the biggest challenges we encounter with creating and managing HREFLang for clients is ensuring that all of the pages are mapped to their alternates. This is a two step process starting with importing all of the URL’s for the various sites and then matching them to their alternative […]

July 9, 2019

How to Correctly Use HREFLang on Regional Sites

If you are reading this article it is likely you have a regional site and trying to figure out how to solve some of the complications it causes with Google. Over the past week, I have talked to a number of Technical SEOs and prospective clients that have seen an […]

May 23, 2019

Do I need to use HREFLang?

Earlier this week we published a report on HREFlang Adoption report that showed nearly 40% of the most localized sites were not using hreflang elements. On Twitter I had a few people ask me to help them justify the need and/or build a business case for HREFLang. Traditional Reasons for […]

May 7, 2019

Why your Custom HREFLang Implementation Does not Work

I get a lot of emails and tweets from site owners that have implemented HREFLang on their site only to not have it work. Most of them are the contributing factors match those found by SEMRush in their 13 Most Common HREFLang Mistakes research report. Working through some of the […]

January 1, 2019

Cross-Domain HREFLang XML Site Map Hosting

We have found a common barrier to HREFLang XML implication is the pushback from IT to update the files. Due to security reasons, many DevOps teams have strict controls on uploading into the root of the site and the frequency of updates. The craziest case was a client that […]