Hreflang: Non-Canonical Return Links

URLs with non-canonical hreflang return links.

Hreflang should only include canonical versions of URLs and this filter picks up return links that go to URLs that are not the canonical version set by the page.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

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

The non-canonical return URLs can be seen in the lower window ‘URL Details’ pane with a ‘Non-Canonical’ confirmation status.

They can be exported in bulk via ‘Reports > Hreflang > Non Canonical Return Links’.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Hreflang’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when hreflang return links point to non-canonical versions of URLs.

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="fr-fr" href="https://www.screamingfrog.com/fr/technical-seo/" />

But https://www.screamingfrog.com/fr/technical-seo/ has the following canonical link element:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://fr.screamingfrog.com/technical-seo/" />

How To Fix

Update hreflang annotations to include canonical versions of URLs only. They should not include links which are canonicalised to other URLs.