- SEORCH
- Hreflang Checker
The mother of all hreflang checks
Enough with half-baked hreflang tools that tell you after three clicks that everything is great .. while Google happily scrambles your international pages in the search results! Welcome to the most merciless reciprocal hreflang matrix crawler on the web.
What does this tool do better?
- A real reciprocal cross-matrix: We don't just check your homepage, we grab EVERY linked language version .. and check whether it dutifully points back to all the others!
- Full XML sitemap audit: We eat complete XML sitemaps for breakfast and compare the XML stuff directly against the real HTML source code to find contradictions.
International SEO is a fine thing .. until hreflang comes into play.
Google's idea actually sounds appealing: You have a website in German, an English version for the global market and maybe a special version for Switzerland with chocolate and francs. So that Googlebot doesn't get completely confused and show the wrong language in the wrong country .. there is the magic hreflang attribute.
Sounds simple? Unfortunately, it isn't at all:
- Missing reciprocity: Page A proudly points to page B .. but page B knows nothing about it and doesn't point back. To Google, that's like a one-sided friend request. Result: ignored.
- Relative URLs: If you write
href="en.html"instead ofhref="https://yourdomain.com/en.html"in your tags .. you've already lost. Google consistently demands absolute URLs with the protocol. Period. - Sitemap vs HTML: The XML sitemap lists a completely different language URL than the actual HTML source code of the page. Search engines hate nothing more than contradictory signals.
- Dead links: Hreflang points to a URL that returns a clean HTTP 404 error or redirects via canonical to a completely different domain.