Unlinked Hreflang URLs
What This Means
URLs that are only discoverable via rel=”alternate” hreflang link annotations. Hreflang annotations do not pass PageRank like a traditional anchor tag, so this might be a sign of a problem with internal linking, or the URLs contained in the hreflang annotation. It can also mean the crawl hasn’t been set up to crawl all pages.
What Triggers This Issue
This issue is triggered when URLs are only discoverable via rel=”alternate” hreflang link annotations and are not linked through traditional anchor tags elsewhere on the website. For example:
https://www.getasky.com/technical-seo/ Has the hreflang annotations:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https://www.getasky.com/technical-seo/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://www.getasky.com/us/technical-seo/" /> But https://www.getasky.com/us/technical-seo/ is not linked to from anywhere else on the website (i.e. it’s an orphan page).How To Fix
Ensure URLs within hreflang annotations are linked to using <a> tags, so they can be crawled, indexed and ranking by search engines.
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