I use SeRanking to help analyzing SEO on my website.
My website is multilingual.
SeRanking audited my website and returned this error: Confirmation links missing on hreflang pages.
This is an example for a page:
In French language, the url is: https://www.example.com/page-1.html
The header of this page begins with:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="fr" lang="fr">
<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/page-1.html" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/page-1.html" hreflang="fr-fr" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.ch/page-1.html" hreflang="fr-ch" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.de/page-1.html" hreflang="de" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/page-1.html" hreflang="x-default" />
</head>
On the Deutsch page the header begins with:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="de" lang="de">
<head>
...
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.de/page-1.html" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/page-1.html" hreflang="fr-fr" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.ch/page-1.html" hreflang="fr-ch" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.de/page-1.html" hreflang="de" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/page-1.html" hreflang="x-default" />
</head>
So i’m not sure what the problem is.
I have two ideas:
Maybe I should use the alternate line <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/page-1.html" hreflang="fr" /> instead of <link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/page-1.html" hreflang="fr-fr" />
Or I should use in the html tag “fr-fr” instead f “fr”
This is how SeRanking explains the problem: Some versions of a page with a hreflang attribute are not linked to each other.
If page A is not linked to page B in the hreflang attribute, page B must be linked back to page A.
If hreflang attributes are not linked back, search engines may ignore them or misinterpret them.
So how can I solve this problem?