jasuja

Thanks @mdjaved15. I was getting this error and it was indeed a disk space issue. Well caught!

We really need to understand how Google recommends to do it and why exactly that error message suddenly appeared.

I explained this to you already. Your current markup is wrong because ‘/de/’ isn’t a real page. It just redirects to the real page. Use only real page URLs in your hreflang and your error will go away.

I don’t use any ML plugins. I just participated in this thread to help the person with their hreflang error. I’m the author of a free hreflang testing tool.

I didn’t say x-default is no longer in use. All I said is that the purpose of x-default now is to signal versions of a page that are either auto-redirecting pages or language/country chooser pages.

But even if you leave your x-default in as it is, it will be fine. Your error is not coming from your x-default. Your error is because for hreflang=”de” you said href=”/de/” but that page redirects to “/”. So you should say hreflang=”de” href=”/” and your error will go away.

You need to tell Google which URLs map to which other URLs. When you do this, don’t use duplicate URLs. the ‘/de’ page redirects to ‘/’. So ‘/de/’ isn’t really a page. So its unfair to ask Google to show that page in its search results. Since it redirects to ‘/’ Google will only index ‘/’ and not ‘/de/’.

I am knowledgeable about hreflang but not about this plugin so I can’t suggest any fixes for you. The only thing I can suggest is that if you want to retain all your hreflang tags as they are, then stop redirecting ‘/de/’ to ‘/’. In that case you will have 3 pages: ‘/’, ‘/de/’ and ‘/en/’

Here is where Google first introduced the x-default:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.html
They said:

The new x-default hreflang attribute value signals to our algorithms that this page doesn’t target any specific language or locale and is the default page when no other page is better suited.

But that’s an old blog post. Their current recommendation is

For language/country selectors or auto-redirecting homepages, you should add an annotation for the hreflang value “x-default” as well:

The purpose of Hreflang is for you to tell Google: here are 3 different pages; please treat them as a single cluster because they are the same content, just in different languages. So Google should be able to crawl to these 3 different pages. If page 2 redirects to page 1, then it’s not really a different page.

In your/@mpek’s case, if it’s hard for you to remove x-default, at least use the correct URL for “de”. The following mark-up will also fix your problem:

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

@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/

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" />

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.

“uk” is not a valid value for the hreflang attribute. You can use “en-GB” for UK-specific English pages.

UPDATE: I’m sorry. “uk” is a valid language code. Your error is missing return tags. The English version of the page (https://smakplus.com/en/ ) should also have the same two hreflang tags. The main rule in hreflang is that if page A links to page B, then page B should also link to page A. And, of course all pages should link to themselves.

Your Hreflang markup is wrong. On the page https://ib-hpc.de/ you indicate that the English version can be found at https://en.ib-hpc.de/?noredirect=en_US

But in reality your English version is at https://en.ib-hpc.de/

You should realize that https://en.ib-hpc.de/?noredirect=en_US and https://en.ib-hpc.de/ are considered 2 different URLs. Stop using the query string and everything should be OK.