An invalid URL in your hreflang attribute can get in the way of the search engine to reference the correct page.

Luckily, your URLs can be updated to solve this issue — even at scale and in a matter of minutes. Here’s how.

Table of Contents

Invalid URLs Result in Errors

An invalid URL in your hreflang attribute will return an error in Search Console. This means your hreflang won’t be serving its intended purpose. 

Validating Hreflang URLs 

The solution to this issue is to ensure that the hreflang URL is valid. If it’s not, you’ll want to update that URL. 

This could involve bringing in the dev team, unless you have direct edit access to your site’s code. Even then, this manual approach will be on a page-by-page cadence. 

Updating Hreflang URLs at Scale

An invalid hreflang URL can be updated with the below process. With SEO execution platform ClarityAutomate, you can implement these changes on your own timeline without the dev team. 

A weeks-long process can be turned into a few minutes of optimizing. It’s a point-and-click solution. 

  1. Select what you'd like to optimize: Code
    Since hreflang is a part of the site’s code, that’s what we want to optimize for this fix. 
  2. Choose how you'd like to optimize it: Update
    The invalid URL needs to be updated to solve this issue. 
  3. XPath location: XPath of the hreflang with the invalid href Attribute: href
    This step locates the hreflang tag with the invalid URL.
  4. New Value: A valid hyperlink for the hreflang
    Lastly, you enter the new, valid URL for your hreflang tag and push your changes live. 

Before and After

Notice how the original URL has “htp” and we were able to easily correct it to “https.” 

 

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