Study: 31% of international websites contain hreflang errors

Hreflang errors studyTo determine how widespread hreflang issues are and which ones are more common, I partnered with NerdyData, which gave me access to their database of websites that contain hreflang code. NerdyData provided a list of 18,786 websites that contain at least one instance of hreflang declaring an alternate within the source code. 31.02% of websites contain conflicting hreflang directivesMy findings show 31.02% of websites serving multiple languages have conflicting hreflang directives. For example:<link rel=”alternate” href=”https://example.com/” hreflang=”en” /><link rel=”alternate” href=”https://example.com/en-uk/” hreflang=”en-gb” /><link rel=”alternate” href=”https://example.com/en-us/” hreflang=”en-gb” /><link rel=”alternate” href=”https://example.com/en-au/” hreflang=”en-au” />Such confusion potentially leads to complications around duplicate content and incorrect ranking and indexing, making it difficult to place well in the SERP. 1.6% of hreflang clusters contain at least one instance of invalid region codesContrary to the previous statistic, relatively few hreflang clusters contain invalid region codes.