Hreflang: Unlinked Hreflang URLs

URLs that are only discoverable via rel=”alternate” hreflang link annotations.

Hreflang annotations do not pass PageRank like a traditional anchor tag, so this might be a sign of a problem with internal linking, or the URLs contained in the hreflang annotation.

It can also mean the crawl hasn’t been set up to crawl all pages.

How to Analyse in the SEO Spider

View URLs with this issue in the ‘Hreflang’ tab and ‘Unlinked Hreflang URLs’ filter.

To populate this filter ‘Crawl Analysis’ must be performed via ‘Crawl Analysis > Start’.

Unlinked hreflang URLs can exported in bulk via ‘Reports > Hreflang > Unlinked hreflang URLs’.

Read our tutorial on ‘How To Audit Hreflang’.

What Triggers This Issue

This issue is triggered when URLs are only discoverable via rel=”alternate” hreflang link annotations and are not linked through traditional anchor tags elsewhere on the website.

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/ is not linked to from anywhere else on the website (i.e. it’s an orphan page).

How To Fix

Ensure URLs within hreflang annotations are linked to using <a> tags, so they can be crawled, indexed and ranking by search engines.