Hreflang and international stores

Who this matters to

If your store sells into more than one country or language, it carries hreflang tags whether you set them up deliberately or not. Shopify Markets adds them. So do most translation apps, and so do themes built for multi-language stores. The tags tell Google which version of a page belongs to which language and region.

They break easily and they break without any visible sign. The page still loads, still looks right, and still takes an order. What changes is which country’s version Google decides to show.

What Rabbot checks on every plan

Rabbot reads the hreflang tags on every monitored page, on the free plan as well as the paid ones. It flags a tag carrying a language or region code that is not valid, and a tag whose link is not a full web address.

Why that matters, in the words of the alert itself: Google ignores invalid tags, so shoppers may still land on the wrong regional page.

What the paid site-level sweep adds

Paid plans add a daily sweep that looks at your pages as one set rather than one page at a time. Two further checks need that whole-set view, so they are a paid capability.

The first is reciprocity. One of your regional pages points to another with an hreflang tag, but that page does not point back. Google ignores non-reciprocal pairs and may serve the wrong country’s page.

The second is target health. One of your regional pages links to another with an hreflang tag, but that target page is now gone or hidden from search. Google drops it from that region’s results, so shoppers searching in that language may not find your store. The sweep follows those targets even when they sit outside your monitored URLs, and it follows a redirect to wherever it ends: a tag pointing at a page that redirects to a live, indexable one is not counted as a broken target, and only a redirect that ends nowhere counts as gone.

What to do when an alert lands

An invalid tag is usually a Markets or translation app change. Check the tag’s language code and link, then fix whichever is wrong.

A page not linking back is usually a Markets setup gap, or a translation app that only added the tag on one side. Check that both pages’ hreflang tags reference each other.

A broken target is usually a deleted or unpublished page. Check that the linked page loads and is set to be indexed.

Rabbot alerts urgently when a previously-correct tag breaks, so an alert about a page that was fine last week comes first.

Findings clear themselves

Rabbot re-checks automatically and confirms when the tag is fixed. There is nothing to close by hand: repair the tag, and the finding closes on the next check.