A Guide to Understanding Self-Referencing Hreflang Tags

Enter self-referencing hreflang tags. To provide a comprehensive overview on the topic of self-referencing hreflang tags, we will cover the following:What Is Self-Referencing Hreflang? Example of self-referencing hreflang tags in XML sitemaps:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9"xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><url><loc>http://www.example.com/english/page.html</loc><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="de"href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="de-ch"href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="en"href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/></url><url><loc>http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html</loc><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="de"href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="de-ch"href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="en"href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/></url><url><loc>http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html</loc><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="de"href="http://www.example.com/deutsch/page.html"/><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="de-ch"href="http://www.example.com/schweiz-deutsch/page.html"/><xhtml:linkrel="alternate"hreflang="en"href="http://www.example.com/english/page.html"/></url></urlset>The resource for the code sample above is from Google. If the phrase "no self-referencing Hreflang" comes up when conducting an hreflang audit, it means that your URL doesn't have a self-referencing hreflang annotation or the hreflang annotation isn't referenced correctly. Other Common Issues With Hreflang TagsIn addition to the no self-referencing hreflang issue, other common issues with hreflang tags include pages containing conflicting hreflang tags and canonical tags, as well as using the same URL and specifying it to more than one language and country.