The hreflang set does not include this page
Updated
What this check looks for
The page lists alternate language versions but does not list itself. Google's documentation requires every page in a set to reference every page in the set, including itself, or the annotations are ignored.
Why it matters
An hreflang set without self-references is the commonest reason a correctly translated site still shows the wrong language version. Everything looks configured and none of it takes effect.
When the check passes, your report says: “The hreflang set includes this page, as Google requires”.
What it costs your score
When this check fails it removes 4 points from your SEO score, before the status, confidence and repeat multipliers are applied. SEO carries a weight of 5 in the overall score.
It shares the seo.i18n family ceiling of 8 points: however many findings that family produces, together they cannot remove more than that from SEO. One underlying problem showing up in several places is still one problem.
- Severity
- low
- Default confidence
- confirmed
- Status when triggered
- warn
- Deduction
- 4 points
- Family cap
- seo.i18n · 8
- Category
- SEO
- Module
- Seo audit
- Fix owned by
- user
- In the ruleset since
- 2026.09
How to fix it
Include this page in its own hreflang set.
Google ignores a set whose members do not all reference each other, including themselves.
Emit the complete list of locales on every page, including the current one.
Generate the list from one source rather than per page, so the set cannot diverge.
Add an
x-defaultentry naming the version to show a reader whose language matches none.
How to confirm it worked
curl -sS ‹url› | grep -i hreflang — the page's own URL should appear
A named slot like ‹domain› — and the braces left in the configuration below — is filled in with your own values when this rule appears on a report.
Technical detail
The set names ‹count› alternates, none of which resolves to ‹url›.
Google's requirement is explicit: each language version must list itself as well as every other version. The rule exists so a crawler encountering any one page of the set can reconstruct the whole set from it, and so the annotations can be trusted as mutual rather than one-directional claims.
Generating the set from a single list of locales, and emitting the full list on every page, makes this structurally impossible to get wrong. Building each page's list by excluding the current locale is how the self-reference goes missing.
As with the validity check, we cannot confirm the return links from the other pages without fetching them. This finding is about this page's own annotation.
Standards and references
Test this on your domain
Run the check that produces this finding, on its own, against any domain.