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hreflang.canonical-other-language

WarningSEO audit

The canonical points to an hreflang alternate in another language, so search engines treat this page as a copy of that one and leave it out of the index.

What to change

Give each language version a canonical that names its own URL, and let hreflang link the versions. Google asks for a canonical in the same language as the page.

The documentation on developers.google.com

A finding of this rule on a page carries the exact edits for that page: the markup it quotes, and what to write instead.

When it runs

Runs on every SEO audit: of a page, a crawl, a build directory or HTML. A warning is a problem that costs a page ranking, clicks or citations. Each finding takes 5 points off the page's score.

The severity here is the rule's usual one: a finding can be raised or lowered when the page gives a reason.

Run it, or skip it

Check a page for this rule alone, after a fix for instance:

npx @rivi-software/agentic-seo-check audit https://example.com --rule hreflang.canonical-other-language

Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_audit_page:

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "rules": [
    "hreflang.canonical-other-language"
  ]
}

To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable hreflang.canonical-other-language on the command, or disableRules: ["hreflang.canonical-other-language"] to a tool.

All 6 rules