Languages & regions
hreflang uses a region code Google ignores
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on every page of a site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
- Based on
- Google's own documentation
What is wrong
Your hreflang tags contain region codes that Google does not recognise. Hreflang is an HTML tag that tells Google which version of a page to show to visitors in different countries or languages. When you use a region code Google ignores, that instruction is skipped entirely, and Google decides for itself which version to serve.
Why it costs you
The result is that visitors may see the wrong language or regional version of your content. A customer in France might see your UK English pages instead of French ones. Worse, Google may not index the versions you intended, or may treat multiple versions as duplicates, diluting their strength in search results.
How to fix it
Fix this in your hreflang tags by using only ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country codes (the standard two-letter codes like GB, FR, DE) or valid language-region combinations like en-GB or fr-CA. Remove any hreflang tags using codes outside this standard. If you have many pages, make this change in your page template or header code rather than editing each page individually, so the fix applies everywhere automatically.
What the audit tests
- No hreflang tag uses UK, EU or UN as its region code
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