Hreflang: Non-200 Hreflang URLs

URLs contained within rel=”alternate” hreflang annotations that do not have a 200 response code, such as URLs blocked by robots.txt, no responses, 3XX (redirects), 4XX (client errors) or 5XX (server errors).

Hreflang URLs must be crawlable and indexable and therefore non-200 URLs are treated as errors, and ignored by the search engines.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Hreflang’ tab and ‘Non-200 Hreflang URLs’ filter.

The non-200 hreflang URLs can be seen in the lower window ‘URL Details’ pane with a ‘non-200’ confirmation status and exported in bulk via ‘Reports > Hreflang > Non-200 Hreflang URLs’.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Hreflang’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs included in rel=”alternate” hreflang annotations do not respond with a 200 status code.

For example:

https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/technical-seo/

Has the hreflang annotations:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/technical-seo/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://www.screamingfrog.com/us/technical-seo/" />

But https://www.screamingfrog.com/us/technical-seo/ responds with a 404 ‘Page Not Found’ response code.

How To Fix

Ensure URLs within hreflang annotations are to the correct canonical and indexable pages.

If Google can’t see pages pointing to each other due to a non-200 response, the tags will be ignored.