SEO auditing and the business of making you anxious
More than one page for same language in hreflang: 614 URLs
Ever got a similar message from one of the "SEO audit" tools? I have and I do constantly. Both from major players like Google: "Hey look, you have got a gazillion non-relevant errors!", to a more sophisticated, "industry-standard" tooling which I will not name here.
The issue is that the business model of SEO is rigged. It is a bit like insurance or most of the things related to legal stuff. Step one is to make it as complicated and convoluted as possible. Step two? Profit.
Because nobody would ever have the time to figure out all that.
Here is a screenshot of an email I got from one of such tools:
One critical item is hreflangs that are bad on my site. Except for... my tool literally deals with them and I took care to study their own documentation on this matter. In fact, I implement two ways of propagating hreflangs from that page.
Did that tool took notice of both of them? Of course not, why bother. Better mark it as an error so users would pay up (both for the tool and the SEO work that is supposed to be done).
That is not a single occurrence — I have encountered the same issue with Yandex.Webmaster (analogous to Google Search Console for the Yandex search engine). Their validator is not aware of the concept of XML namespaces like these:
xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
which you can use in order to specify alternative link tags for the URLs in the sitemap:
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="supported_language-code">
Google does not have problem with it, in fact I am sure even Yandex would not, however the yapping about how bad and broken and how that there are another 1000 errors on your site continues...
They are literally creating jobs out of thin air. Granted, SEO as a "field" is pretty esoteric in itself, but this only cements that. In the end, both developers and clients waste their time discussing this in a futile attempt to make right the thing that by design can never be right.