| name | seo-hreflang |
| description | Hreflang and international SEO audit, validation, and generation. Detects common mistakes, validates language/region codes, and generates correct hreflang implementations. Use when user says "hreflang", "i18n SEO", "international SEO", "multi-language", "multi-region", or "language tags".
|
| risk | unknown |
| source | https://github.com/AgriciDaniel/claude-seo |
| date_added | 2026-03-21 |
| user-invokable | true |
| argument-hint | [url] |
| allowed-tools | ["Read","Grep","Glob","Bash","WebFetch"] |
Hreflang & International SEO
When to Use
- Use when validating or generating hreflang for multilingual or multiregional sites.
- Use when the user mentions international SEO, language tags, x-default, or hreflang issues.
- Use when auditing locale alternates across HTML, headers, or sitemap implementations.
Validate existing hreflang implementations or generate correct hreflang tags
for multi-language and multi-region sites. Supports HTML, HTTP header, and
XML sitemap implementations.
Validation Checks
1. Self-Referencing Tags
- Every page must include an hreflang tag pointing to itself
- The self-referencing URL must exactly match the page's canonical URL
- Missing self-referencing tags cause Google to ignore the entire hreflang set
2. Return Tags
- If page A links to page B with hreflang, page B must link back to page A
- Every hreflang relationship must be bidirectional (A→B and B→A)
- Missing return tags invalidate the hreflang signal for both pages
- Check all language versions reference each other (full mesh)
3. x-default Tag
- Required: designates the fallback page for unmatched languages/regions
- Typically points to the language selector page or English version
- Only one x-default per set of alternates
- Must also have return tags from all other language versions
4. Language Code Validation
- Must use ISO 639-1 two-letter codes (e.g.,
en, fr, de, ja)
- Common errors:
eng instead of en (ISO 639-2, not valid for hreflang)jp instead of ja (incorrect code for Japanese)zh without region qualifier (ambiguous; use zh-Hans or zh-Hant)
5. Region Code Validation
- Optional region qualifier uses ISO 3166-1 Alpha-2 (e.g.,
en-US, en-GB, pt-BR)
- Format:
language-REGION (lowercase language, uppercase region)
- Common errors:
en-uk instead of en-GB (UK is not a valid ISO 3166-1 code)es-LA (Latin America is not a country; use specific countries)
