Hreflang: Incorrect Language & Region Codes

URLs with hreflang annotations that contain invalid language (in ISO 639-1 format) and or optional regional (in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format) values.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Hreflang’ tab and ‘Incorrect Language & Region Codes’, filter and export all URLs using the ‘Export’ button.

Unsupported hreflang values can be viewed in the lower window ‘URL Details’ pane with an ‘Invalid’ status.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Hreflang’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when hreflang annotations contain invalid language codes (based on ISO 639-1 format) or optional regional codes (based on ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format).

For example:

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

Has the hreflang annotation:

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

Where ‘en-UK’ is not a valid regional code, and instead should be ‘en-GB’.

How To Fix

Update hreflang annotations to include valid language and regional values, so they can be used for geotargeting the right audiences appropriately.