Dealing with International issues?

Crawl your website with Sitebulb for 300+ tech SEO checks

Try for Free
High This Hint is very important, and definitely warrants attention. Issue This Hint represents an error or problem that needs to be fixed.

Has multiple self-referencing hreflang annotations

This means that the URL in question has one or more self-referenced hreflang annotations, that specify different hreflang values - so there is a conflict between the annotations.

Why is this important?

Self-reference hreflang is not actually a mandatory requirement. It appeared in the original recommendations that Google published as they figured it would be easier for users to just copy/paste the same 'hreflang cluster' on all corresponding translation pages.

However, including conflicting self-referenced hreflang may serve to confuse search engines, to the point where they ignore the hreflang instruction entirely. 

What does the Hint check?

This Hint will trigger for any URL which has multiple self-referenced hreflang annotations to the same URL, where the annotations do not match.

Examples that trigger this Hint:

Consider the URL: https://example.com/en/page-a/

The Hint would trigger for this URL if it had conflicting self-referenced hreflang;

<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/en/page-a/" hreflang="en-us" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://example.com/en/page-a/" hreflang="de-de" />

How do you resolve this issue?

There is no benefit to including multiple self-referenced hreflang, especially if they are conflicting.

To resolve, either manually update the URLs to remove the extraneous self-references, or fix the script that generates the hreflang (depending on how the site is setup). Alternatively, you could remove all instances of self-referenced hreflang, as it is not mandatory.

Further Reading

Sitebulb Desktop

Find, fix and communicate technical issues with easy visuals, in-depth insights, & prioritized recommendations across 300+ SEO issues.

  • Ideal for SEO professionals, consultants & marketing agencies.

Sitebulb Cloud

Get all the capability of Sitebulb Desktop, accessible via your web browser. Crawl at scale without project, crawl credit, or machine limits.

  • Perfect for collaboration, remote teams & extreme scale.