Hreflang: Noindex Returns Links

URLs with return links which have a ‘noindex’ meta tag.

All pages within a set should be indexable, and hence any return URLs with ‘noindex’ may result in the hreflang relationship being ignored.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Hreflang’ tab and ‘Noindex Returns Links’ filter.

The noindex return links URLs can be seen in the lower window ‘URL Details’ pane with a ‘noindex’ confirmation status.

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

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Hreflang’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when hreflang return links point to pages with a ‘noindex’ meta tag.

For example:

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-fr" href="https://www.screamingfrog.com/fr/technical-seo/" />

But https://www.screamingfrog.com/fr/technical-seo/ has a meta ‘noindex’ tag.

How To Fix

Update hreflang annotations to include indexable URLs only. They should not include links which are ‘noindex’.