No-return tag error
-
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!
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Tag Clouds in Google Despite Canonical Links for Single Tags/Articles
I am frustrated to see a lot tag clouds in Google even though I programmed my tagged pages to display a canonical link to the linking article if the is only one result for the tag cloud. The goal to to make sure that the article, which is of better quality than the tag page, ends up in Google without a bunch of thin tag pages getting in there. For instance this article should be in Google and this tag should not be because that tag has a canonical URL for that article. I do not have a lot of experience with tag cloud SEO because I prefer to limit such pages to categories, but I have found tag clouds to be important for aggregating information for specific issues, people, or places that are not already a site category. Some tags I have used to power social media pages that update automatically from RSS feeds for their related tag archives. That is quite useful for pages like that. Should I start using Meta noindex for those instead of rel canonical? I have already done that for author profiles because author profiles get a lot of on site links compared to individual articles because my gridviews use javascript for paging. The same is true for the tags, so if a tag is tagged in 30 articles it will have links from 30 articles but if those articles are not in the latest 20 for that tag only the latest 20 will have links back from the tag archive. I also suspect having a lot of tag pages with little content to negatively impact my indexing rate. I will see a number of recent tag pages added before new articles.
On-Page Optimization | | CopBlaster.com0 -
Title Tags for a Joomla Website
Does anyone know what is the best way or plugin to use to easily get title tags inserted for a Joomla website? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Gavo0 -
Duplicate Page Titles in Crawl Errors (although Google is rewriting in serps ??)
Hi Im working on a client/project and crawl report is showing thousands of dupe page titles In the case of the blog/news section its aprox 50 since aprox 50 posts and they all have the same meta-title: "Brand News | Brand" as opposed to: "Title Unique to Page/Topic/KW Relating to Content | Brand" Since these are the main content pages we want to rank (in addition to the main site category pages) then i have instructed dev must prioritise populating these pages meta-titles with the actual post/article titles, as per the latter version of the above example. (I should mention that i have requested they fix all dupe titles but main content pages are the priority). Whilst this will reduce the number of dupe titles in crawl error/warning report which is a good thing, is it actually likely to increase the ranking of these news/content pages given that Google does seem to be rewriting the titles correctly in the serps based on the page content ? Many Thanks in advance for your input
On-Page Optimization | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
400 error - Phone number link.
I am getting 400 errors for all my pages that have a phone number with a link to Skype etc on click, is this a genuine issue or am I ok? How do I resolve this? Any bright ideas, here is an example of the issue - http://www.arts1.co.uk/5-reasons-to-choose-arts1 There are pages of these and I am not sure what to do? Many Thanks James Grimsey
On-Page Optimization | | jamesgrimsey0 -
How long does it take Google to index new title tags and meta descriptions?
Hi, I have launched a website ( www.bookkeepingking.com )and would like Google to reflect the latest title tag changes in its results. How long does it typically take to happen? I believe this might be one reason why the site may not be generating any search traffic yet, even though I haven't yet begun any link building yet. A couple of notes: When I enter site:bookkeepingking.com in the search box, the pages show up, but with the old/default title and meta descriptions. I am using the Yoast for SEO plugin I have resubmitted the XML map - Yoast created 2... /page-sitemap.xml and /post-sitemap.xml The changes were made about 1 week ago. WMT says that there are zero errors. Is there something I may have missed? Or do I just need to give it more time? Thanks in advance for your help. Erin
On-Page Optimization | | HiddenPeak0 -
Does anyone have any opinions on whether to use a pipe | in your title tags? Or commas or just nothing at all?
I am trying to decided whether to use: BootsJeansandLeathers.com Mens Jeans Mens Boots Mens Leathers Mens Footwear OR BootsJeansandLeathers.com | Mens Jeans | Mens Boots | Mens Leathers | Mens Footwear as my title?
On-Page Optimization | | ebowdublin0 -
To many links on a single page Error
I've seen it a few times where you should have less then 100 links per page to help crawling unless your a massively authoritative website. But what happens when your a large ecommerce website with categories and sub categories, you could have a category called 'computers' with a drop down list containing lots of sub cat links. Whats the solution to this? Cheers
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper1