I structured my website following this tutorial that explains to do the following when you deal with profile pages that have menus translated but their contents are probably in the language of the content owner.
Example: Pedro is a Spanish guy. His profile on the Spanish version of the website will be the canonical url that lists all other variants like this:
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example/en/profile/pedro" hreflang="en">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example/fr/profile/pedro" hreflang="fr">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example/it/profile/pedro" hreflang="it">
Those siblings will not have any alternate tags but only a canonical tag that links to the canonical URL (ie: Pedro's profile on the Spanish version of the page).
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/es/profile/pedro">
My questions:
- Is this procedure (still) correct?
- Why does Google Webmaster tools claim "no return tag" Error in the thousands when I do it like this?
You can see a real example here:
https://www.bodalgo.com/de/sprecher/armin-hierstetter
This is the canonical page that incorporates all the alternate languages which - in return - have the link above set as canonical. I do not understand why Webmaster Tools claim there needs to be a return tag when google's own tutorial (the link above) claims that there should not be any return tags on the non canonical language variant pages.