site.hreflang-no-return-link
hreflang alternates do not link back to the page that references them.
What to change
Every page in an hreflang cluster must list all alternates including itself; mismatches invalidate the annotations.
The documentation on developers.google.comA 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 a crawl or a build directory. 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 crawl https://example.com --rule site.hreflang-no-return-link
Or from an assistant, with the MCP tool seo_crawl_site:
{
"url": "https://example.com",
"rules": [
"site.hreflang-no-return-link"
]
}
To leave it out of an audit, pass --disable site.hreflang-no-return-link on the command, or disableRules: ["site.hreflang-no-return-link"] to a tool.
More in Site-wide checks
All 49 rules- Info
site.deep-pagesPages that are more than the configured number of clicks (default 3) from the start URL. - Warning
site.soft-404A clearly non-existent URL returns HTTP 200 instead of 404. - Warning
site.http-not-redirectedThe http:// version of the site does not redirect to https://. - Warning
site.host-variant-not-redirectedThe www/non-www variant of the host does not redirect to the main host. - Warning
site.broken-external-linksExternal links point to URLs that return 4xx/5xx or fail to load. - Info
site.unlinked-pagesHTML files in the build output that no other page links to. - Error
site.canonical-target-brokenPages name a canonical URL that answers 4xx/5xx or does not load, so search engines cannot use it. - Warning
site.canonical-target-redirectsPages name a canonical URL that redirects; the canonical should be the final URL.