No-return tag error

[eGInnovations]

Am receiving a no-return tag error on Search Console for pages in our site that are unrelated.

Originating Page:  https://www.eginnovations.com/in-the-news/performance-assurance-a-key-to-virtual-desktop-success

Alternate URL:  https://www.eginnovations.com/fr/

There is a link to the /fr/ page in the language version at the top of the page but I can't figure out why this would be throwing an error from the originating page.  Any help would be appreciated!

[seoelevated]

The alternate links with hreflang tags should be present on all the alternate pages. In the example you gave above, there is a self-referencing tag on the English page, and there are a bunch of alternate tags on the French page. But the English page is missing the alternate links to point to the French (and other) alternate pages for those various languages.

To simplify, if you only had English and French pages, then the English page should include a self-referencing tag for English, and an alternate tag for French. And the French page would include a self-referencing tag for French, and an alternate link for English. You might also include an "x-default" on the English page, if it's intended as the primary version for any unspecified other users.

[eGInnovations]

So we only have alternate languages for our homepage. We have hreflang on our homepage as well as the international pages, but not on any other page. Here's a screenshot from our homepage with the hreflang. Do you see an error? Thanks!

dWeu8Bo

[seoelevated]

I have not personally seen the use of hreflang inside of the canonical link annotation, as you've done it on the English pages outside of your homepage. I see this on one of those pages:

rel="canonical" href="https://www.eginnovations.com/cloud-monitoring" hreflang="en"/>

That might be the culprit. I don't know for sure that this is wrong, or hurting anything, But it's not something I have ever used (embedding the hreflang inside the canonical tag). You might try removing that fragment. HREFLANG is only on a page-to-page (not site-to-site) level, so I would only include it on pages which have an alternate page available.

[eGInnovations]

Actually, the problem we're having is on the pages for which we do not have alternate versions. We're getting errors on those pages and it makes no sense to me. We have the canonical in place as such:

| https://www.eginnovations.com/in-the-news/performance-assurance-a-key-to-virtual-desktop-success" hreflang="en"/> |
| |

and no other hreflang in place as we do not have international versions of these pages. That's what's baffling.

[seoelevated]

Right, that's what I'm suggesting to change. Although I am not 100% sure. But I would try removing the hreflang which is inside the canonical, like you have copy and pasted above. Just keep the canonical normal. There's also a slight inconsistency between your use of EN and EN-US, but if you remove the hreflang from the canonical tags, that will take care of that too. Again, I'm not 100% sure, but that's what I'd try next anyway.

[NickSamuel]

Hi Natalie,

As SEO Elevated said, the issue is most probably caused by the hreflang tag being within the canonical...

Canonical should point to itself for each language version so to speak, have nothing to do with rel alternate or hreflang.

Baisc example for language versions, required in both English and French Headers:

<ink rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="yoursite.com fr="" "=""></ink rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="yoursite.com>

Hope I've understood correctly, I looked at the homepage but feel free to share

Good luck!

Nick

P.S

Might be worth checking this tool out: https://technicalseo.com/seo-tools/hreflang/

There's quite a few of these "hreflang" validator type tools which can be useful in troubleshooting