HREFLANG No Return Tag Error

[SoulSurfer8]

Keep getting WMT no return tag error. Also got an email today on this issue. Here are a couple pages showing up in the error report:

Originating URL: /hawaii/kauai-real-estate/

Alternate URL: /jp/hawaii/kauai-real-estate/

Here are the hreflang tags for each page:

/hawaii/kauai-real-estate/

/jp/hawaii/kauai-real-estate/

The only thing I can see is the hreflang= is at the end of the snippet but doesn't seem like that would matter. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[NickJasuja]

Markup looks OK but is that the full picture? Are there redirects involved here? Is the canonical tag pointing elsewhere? What's the actual URL?

[SoulSurfer8]

Hi Nikhlish, thanks for the response. I'm waiting for client to approve me posting URLs.

In the meantime, does each page need to physically link to the different language version? in other words, do I need a direct from /hawaii/kauai-real-estate/ to /jp/hawaii/kauai-real-estate/ ?

We don't have any redirects or canonical tags on the page.

[NickJasuja]

By physical link do you mean

That is not necessary. What you need is elements in the .

[SoulSurfer8]

Yes that is what we have:

Don't understand what we're getting errors...

[NickJasuja]

If you can't post the URLs here, try an Hreflang testing tool. I built one at https://app.hreflang.org

[SoulSurfer8]

Here's a few pages that show up as errors in WMT. We also just recently received a message from WMT regarding this.

International Targeting | Language > 'ja' - no return tags

URLs for your site and alternate URLs in 'ja' that do not have return tags

https://www.locationshawaii.com/jp/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx
https://www.locationshawaii.com/jp/kauai/hanalei-real-estate.aspx

Same thing is happening for English versions:

https://www.locationshawaii.com/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx
https://www.locationshawaii.com/kauai/hanalei-real-estate.aspx

[gfiorelli1]

Question:

Why https://www.locationshawaii.com/jp/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx and https://www.locationshawaii.com/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx appear to me both in Japanese?

(this happens if first I visited the Japanese version).

Second big mistake: your language switcher in the header is Java... cannot be seen by bots. Change it, because I'm quite confident that the message you're seeing are also because of it. In fact, the hreflang annotations are correctly implemented (saw manually and using flang.dejan.com.au test tool).

Finally... try to avoid Google Translate as a way to translate content on site and, please, localize ALL the content (specifically navigation menu, sidebar links, banners...)

[SoulSurfer8]

Thank you, really appreciate the insight. We'll work on this.