Google Search Console reported faulty hreflang-Tags on my website

Could you translate what the actual error is reported?

yes, sure…

keine Rücklinks means no backlinks

Use a tool like hreflang.org to find what the errors are. No backlinks aka missing return tags happen usually because interlinking has not been implemented correctly.

If page A is in Engilsh and page B is in German, your markup should be
<link rel=alternate hreflang=en href=”https://example.com/page_A”&gt;
<link rel=alternate hreflang=de href=”https://example.com/page_B”&gt;

Note that both link tags should be present on both pages.

Is this a theme issue then?

No, this should not be a theme issue, unless they do something really inappropriate, which is very unlikely.

Could you show what you have in source for entries with “hreflang” and “x-default”? Just search the source (Ctrl-U in Chrome) of the page in trouble for those words and copy all lines found here.

BTW, next time when you do a screenshot, switch Google Console to English, since this forum’s main language is English – then you would reach a larger audience ??

Hi @mpek, it looks like you do not enjoy much working with PHP code ??
In this case it is really the best way to hire a PHP developer, who can tune it for you. I am sure your problems are solvable, but without seeing the code and being able to troubleshoot it in a meaningful way it is very hard and very time consuming thing to do. You may also submit a request for a paid job to us.

I am closing the issue here, since there is not much we can do without your deep participation. I hope you will figure it out one way or another, if you have not done so already.

Good luck to you in the further development!

Hi John,

you must be a very funny guy ??

I guess, you expected a faster response and I had many other things to do.

Thank you for your help. This should be the information you asked for:

<link hreflang="de" href="https://www.pekic.de/de/" rel="alternate" />
<link hreflang="en" href="https://www.pekic.de/en/" rel="alternate" />
<link hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.pekic.de/" rel="alternate" />

<div class="footer-menu"><h2>Sprache:</h2>
<ul class="language-chooser language-chooser-image qtranxs_language_chooser" id="qtranslate-3-chooser">
<li class="lang-de active"><a href="https://www.pekic.de/de/" hreflang="de" title="Deutsch (de)" class="qtranxs_image qtranxs_image_de"><img src="https://www.pekic.de/wp-content/plugins/qtranslate-x/flags/de.png" alt="Deutsch (de)" /><span style="display:none">Deutsch</span></a></li>
<li class="lang-en"><a href="https://www.pekic.de/en/" hreflang="en" title="English (en)" class="qtranxs_image qtranxs_image_en"><img src="https://www.pekic.de/wp-content/plugins/qtranslate-x/flags/gb.png" alt="English (en)" /><span style="display:none">English</span></a></li>
</ul><div class="qtranxs_widget_end"></div>
</div>

I am funny guy ?? Indeed, normally people respond within hours when they care. Your other topic was two weeks old with no reply either, so I suspected that you abandoned theses topics. I will know now about you ??

Anyway, that looks normal. I’ll have to try to reproduce. Which Google tool exactly did you use to see that error?

It’s Webmasters Toolkit, that they recently renamed to Search Console.

This is the URL i use:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

This happened to me too, but I believe it fixed itself as the error is no longer there. ??

https://www.pekic.de/de/ redirects to https://www.pekic.de so you should not use https://www.pekic.de/de/ in your hreflang markup.

Use this mark-up to fix the issue:

<link hreflang="de" href="https://www.pekic.de/" rel="alternate" />
<link hreflang="en" href="https://www.pekic.de/en/" rel="alternate" />

Thank you for your participation!

@daniel: How did you check if the hreflang-tags are ok?

@jasuja: is this for John or can I do something on my side?

@mpek, do not do anything yet, we have to investigate why Google suddenly started giving error messages against their own former instructions. In other thread https://qtranslate-x.com/support/index.php?topic=293, pelople reported that there was some change in Google plolicies in January 2016. We have not had a chance yet to research it.

@jasuja, that redirection is normal, it sets the language to be ‘de’, otherwise “https://www.pekic.de/ may come up with different languages depending on what language was previously chousen by a user. This is explained here: https://qtranslatexteam.wordpress.com/browser-redirection-based-on-language/.
That is why Google recommends to set x-default, which is essential part here and cannot be omitted. Those three lines used to work just fine, I am not sure what happened now, needs to be researched.

@john: Auto redirection is a recipe for disaster because if Googlebot gets auto-redirected based on IP then it will never be able to crawl all your pages.

x-default only needs to be used if you have a page that’s only for choosing the language. In @mpek’s site you can switch language on any page. So x-default is unnecessary. (Google used to recommend using x-default but that’s no longer the case.)

Keep things simple for everyone. Have only 2 pages — one for DE and one for EN — and link them to each other. In @mpek’s case these pages are https://www.pekic.de/ and https://www.pekic.de/en/
[Note that https://www.pekic.de/en/ and https://www.pekic.de/en are separate (trailing slash matters)]

Always use the original, canonical version of the URL in your hreflang markup. More details here: https://hreflang.org/redirects-canonicals-cause-hreflang-problems/

@jasuja:

x-default only needs to be used if you have a page that’s only for choosing the language

Exactly, this is the entry page where user can choose the language. Redirection was punished by Google except when with a purpose of setting a language. We used to be in sync with Google requirements. Anyway, if Google now wants us to do the things in a different way we will comply.

Unfortunately, such change, as you propose, is not simple at all, there are many things to think about. Many themes create language-neutral links in many places, which only work now because language is set in cookies and those links get redirected to the language chosen by user. This was a huge improvement over old qtx, which made many themes to work much more consistently. Not to mention the complexity added by proper handling of ajax calls. If we simply take this away, we will essentially break all those themes now. I am not sure what to do, we need to research it.

Do you have a link where it is explained that “x-default” is retired now and why?

Thanks a lot for your help!