Rule catalogue

Site rules

Judged across the whole crawl, because no single page carries the evidence. Fixing one of these usually fixes a whole column of findings at once.

Rules goflag will not answer for you

Whether a title describes the page is not something a linter can decide. goflag could fake it — count words, match boilerplate, print a confident verdict — and the result would be unfalsifiable noise. So it states the question, cites what makes it a real requirement, attaches the observed facts, and stops. Ask for them with --advisories; they carry no severity, never count toward the verdict, and are only asked where the subject exists.

hreflang reciprocity codes

Computed cross-page and reported under missingTranslations.reciprocity rather than through the rule registry, which is why they carry a code instead of a severity. See Translations.

missing-back-link

hreflang is only honoured when it is reciprocal. A one-way declaration is discarded, so the cluster silently degrades to no cluster at all.

`/fr/pricing` declares an alternate to `/es/precios` but the peer does not link back.

x-default-missing

`x-default` is what a visitor whose language matches none of yours is sent to. Without it the engine guesses, and it guesses per query.

Page advertises 4 locales but no `hreflang="x-default"`.

locale.invalid

An invalid tag is not a fallback, it is ignored: underscore instead of hyphen is enough to void the entire alternate.

`hreflang="pt_BR"` is not a valid BCP 47 tag.

What rigor means

Every rule judged on a single page records how authoritative the requirement behind it is, and cites at least one document that backs it. The three site rules do not yet — they run on the contract that predates the catalogue, so the table above shows — for them, and the exported catalogue emits rigor: null rather than a rigor nobody assigned. This is the honest answer to “says who?”: a heuristic is folklore you may knowingly ignore, a spec-required is not. A rule can never claim more authority than its strongest source carries — that is enforced in CI, not left to good intentions.

spec-required

A published standard says the page MUST do this. Not a matter of taste.

spec-recommended

A standard says SHOULD: expected practice, with room for a deliberate exception.

vendor-spec

A de-facto specification a single vendor controls — Open Graph, Google's canonicalization rules. Binding on the consumers that implement it, not on the web.

guideline

Documented best practice from a source worth trusting. No specification behind it.

heuristic

Industry folklore. Often useful, occasionally wrong, and never something to fix as though a standard demanded it.

Rigor is a fact about the world, so no option changes it. What your build should do about each rule is a separate question, and that is what profiles answer.