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Rule catalogue

hreflang.missing

Pages on a multilingual site must advertise their locale alternates

errorsite-widevendor-spec

Why it matters

This is the blind spot goflag was built to close. Without alternates, an engine cannot tell four translations of a page from four competing pages, so they consolidate nothing and split each other's authority. Google is explicit that a cluster whose pages do not all point at each other is not weakened but ignored outright, which is why this is an error rather than a warning even though no web standard requires the tags at all.

What the finding looks like

The message goflag prints, with example values substituted.

error hreflang.missing Page declares no hreflang alternates, but the site serves 4 locales (en, es, fr, pt-br, per the sitemap). Locale variants of this route cannot be associated with each other.

How to fix it

The catalogue carries no snippet for a site rule: a cross-page rule builds its remedy from what the crawl found, so goflag attaches the fix to the finding itself rather than to the rule. Run it and read the finding.

Says who?

This rule is vendor-spec, and it cites the documents below. Nothing here is goflag’s opinion of what a good page looks like — if you disagree with a finding, this is what you are disagreeing with.