What are the hreflang related errors that can occur when running site audits on a Webflow site using Weglot for multilingual functionality?
TL;DR
- Ensure Weglot correctly injects hreflang tags and avoid manual duplicates to prevent conflicts or missing attributes.
- Verify proper language codes, include self-referencing and reciprocal hreflang links, align canonical tags, and confirm all localized URLs are crawlable.
When using Weglot for multilingual functionality in Webflow, common hreflang-related errors may appear during SEO audits due to how translation routing is handled. Below are the typical issues and how they occur.
1. Missing hreflang Attributes
- Webflow does not natively generate
hreflangtags, and Weglot may not always inject them correctly depending on your integration. - Auditing tools may report missing
hreflangtags for alternate language versions of a page. - This happens when the audit tool cannot detect alternate language references (e.g.,
rel="alternate" hreflang="es"for Spanish) in the<head>.
2. Incorrect hreflang Values
- Some audit tools may detect invalid hreflang codes (e.g., using
en-usinstead of the properen-UScasing or missing support for regional language codes). - Weglot automatically sets these values, but misconfiguration in custom code overrides or manual insertions can lead to errors.
3. Self-referencing hreflang Missing
- Each page should include a hreflang tag referencing itself (e.g., an English page should have
hreflang="en"pointing to its own URL). - Some SEO tools will warn if the self-reference is missing or incorrectly formatted.
4. Inconsistent Canonical and Hreflang Tags
- Weglot may override or conflict with manually set canonical tags, which leads to mismatched URLs between
canonicalandhreflangtags. - This inconsistency can cause search engines to distrust the language targeting.
5. No Return Tags (Reciprocity Issue)
- If the Spanish version of your page references the English version, the English version should also reference back to the Spanish version via
hreflang. - Some CDN-cached Weglot setups fail to ensure bidirectional hreflang relationships, leading to return tag warnings.
6. Duplicate or Conflicting hreflang Tags
- If you manually add
hreflangtags in Webflow’s<head>and Weglot injects its own dynamically, this can result in duplicate or conflicting tags. - Search engines may ignore all hreflang data if conflicting entries exist.
7. Crawling Blocked for Alternate Versions
- If language-specific subdomains or subdirectories (e.g.,
/fr/,/de/) are blocked by robots.txt, audit tools will report that hreflang URLs are not crawlable. - Make sure Weglot-generated paths are accessible and not disallowed.
Summary
Hreflang-related errors with Webflow + Weglot typically involve missing or malformed tags, incorrect language codes, self-reference or return link issues, and canonical conflicts. Ensure Weglot injects hreflang attributes properly, avoid manual duplication, and verify all language paths are crawlable.