Message on google webmastertools regarding wrong implementation of "hreflang" tag

Hi,

Just got this message on google webmaster tools:

We have noticed that on a number of the pages on your site the rel-alternate-hreflang implementation is incorrect
In particular, there seems to be a problem with missing or incorrect bi-directional linking (when page A links with hreflang to page B, there must be a link back from B to A as well). When our algorithms detect conflicting signals like on these pages, they may make indexing and ranking decisions that do not match what you intended.

Click to expand...

I have the hreflang tags set for a few months now and nothing has changed recently with how they are implemented.


This is how they are set:


English page: domain.com/page.html

has the following:



French page: domain.com/fr/page.html

has the following:



I'm using canonical since each page can have a few parameters for tracking purposes.


So I have the link back from B to A as needed, not sure what is wrong on my setup?

Hi Tony,

Are you including the protocol in the href (http)?

I've heard a lot of people getting these warnings even though they had no bi-directional linking problems. Assuming your href values are correct I wouldn't worry about it. Perhaps Google hadn't crawled both version before sending the warning?!?