Hreflang: Inconsistent Language & Region Confirmation Links

URLs with inconsistent language and regional return links to them. This is where a return link has a different language or regional value than the URL is referencing itself.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Hreflang’ tab and ‘Inconsistent Language & Region Confirmation Links’ filter.

The inconsistent language return URLs can be seen in the lower window ‘URL Details’ pane with an ‘Inconsistent’ confirmation status.

They can be exported in bulk via ‘Reports > Hreflang > Inconsistent Language Return Links’.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Hreflang’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs have hreflang annotations with inconsistent language or regional return links.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/fr/technical-seo/

Has the hreflang annotations:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.screamingfrog.com/fr/technical-seo/" />

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/technical-seo/" />

But https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/technical-seo/ has the hreflang annotations:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/technical-seo/" />

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-ca" href="https://www.screamingfrog.com/fr/technical-seo/" />

How To Fix

Ensure alternate pages include the same language and regional values in its hreflang annotation return links as the page declares within its own.