hreflang for language versions: Crawl Audit check 70

Short answer: if your site has the same page in more than one language, or for more than one country, hreflang tags tell Google which version to show which searcher. Each version has to list all the others, and itself. Check 70 passes if hreflang tags are present, passes if the page looks single-language, and warns if the page uses several languages without any hreflang.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Pass: one or more <link rel="alternate" hreflang="..."> tags are present, with the count.
• Pass: no hreflang, and only one language is declared in the page's lang attributes.
• Warning: no hreflang, but more than one different lang value appears on the page.

This is a presence check. It doesn't yet follow each alternate link to confirm it links back. Check that yourself, as below.

What Google says

• "Each language version must list itself as well as all other language versions."
• "If two pages don't both point to each other, the tags will be ignored." That stops another site claiming to be a version of yours.
• Alternate addresses must be full ones, starting with https://.
• Codes are a language in ISO 639-1 format, optionally followed by a region in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format, such as en-GB. Other codes "such as es-419, aren't supported."
• For a language picker or a page that redirects by location, use x-default.
• And: "Google doesn't use hreflang or the HTML lang attribute to detect the language of a page". Google detects the language itself; hreflang only links the versions together.

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://example.com/en-gb/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ur-PK" href="https://example.com/ur-pk/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/">

The same three lines go on all three pages.

On devmarde.com

devmarde.com is in English only. On 3 October the homepage had lang="en" and no hreflang tags, so check 70 passes as single-language.

On your platform

• Shopify: sites using Shopify Markets for languages or regions get hreflang tags added automatically.
• Wix: Wix Multilingual adds hreflang tags, including x-default, by default.
• WordPress: multilingual plugins usually write them. Check one page in each language in view-source.
• Next.js: set alternates.languages in generateMetadata, with the same list on every version.

Sources

• Google Search Central, Tell Google about localized versions of your page (updated 21 September 2026), checked 3 October 2026.