Google search console says 2 redirect errors out of 15 pages using hreflang

Question

My website on Github Pages has 15 different pages for different languages and locales. They all have the following in the head block.

        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index.html" hreflang="x-default" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-de.html" hreflang="de" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-fr.html" hreflang="fr" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-es.html" hreflang="es" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-it.html" hreflang="it" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-pl.html" hreflang="pl" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-se.html" hreflang="se" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-ru.html" hreflang="ru" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-ua.html" hreflang="uk" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-in.html" hreflang="in" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-cn.html" hreflang="zh" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-jp.html" hreflang="ja" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-ca.html" hreflang="en-ca" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-fr-ca.html" hreflang="fr-ca" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-au.html" hreflang="en-au" />
        <link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-gb.html" hreflang="en-gb" />

Google Search Console is complaining about redirect errors for two of those pages: index-de.html and index-fr.html. I can't figure out what's wrong.

Also, should I have an alternate link for "en" or is the "x-default" good enough?

Answer 1

First,

<link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/index-fr.html" hreflang="fr" />

This is not a conventional way to specify a multi-regional/multilingual version of a page. Google's guidelines cite the use a subdomain or sub directory for the lang code...or have ccTLDs.

I suppose you still have unique pages for each country/language but I'd prefer to see it implemented in a conventional way.

So you'd have either:

https://en.example.com/index.html
https://fr.example.com/index.html
etc...

or

https://example.com/en/index.html
https://example.com/fr/index.html
etc...

Also what about https://359north.com? This is reachable, and likely the expected homepage, yet for your home button you link to /index.html. So you need to make a decision there. I would drop the index.html across the board. Here is an example of a correct (albeit incomplete) implementation assuming you're based in the US:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://359north.com" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-GB" href="https://359north.com/en-gb" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://359north.com/de" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://359north.com/fr" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://359north.com" />

Ardacar's theory that your redirect problem might have to do with no canonicals set is plausible. However, to me it seems like a Search Console false positive bug because you're only seeing this for two random pages. Make sure that you set up the canonicals correctly, as there is a very common wrong way to do this that I see all the time.

<!--British page-->

<link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-GB" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com" hreflang="en-US"/>
<link rel="canonical" href="https://359north.com"/>

The above tells search engines that even if a British user searches for this page, we’d like the US page to show up in search results.

So the correct way to do this would be:

<!--USA Page-->

<link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/en-GB" hreflang="en-GB" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com" hreflang="en-US" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://359north.com"/>

<!--On British Page-->

<link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/en-gb" hreflang="en-GB" />
<link rel="alternate" href="https://359north.com/" hreflang="en-US" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://359north.com/en-gb"/>

Answer 2

I looked at your website and your codes and found something missing.

The reason for the error may be that you are not using canonical. Canonical should be used on every page, but not available on your website. You can access detailed information from https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/crawling/consolidate-duplicate-urls.

The answer to your other question is that there is no need to specify the language of your homepage. I'm saying this answer based on the example in the link. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2013/04/x-default-hreflang-for-international-pages.