Hreflang return-link audit script built with Python standard library
Hreflang annotations can fail silently when language pages do not link back to each other, causing the wrong version to rank in a given country. The tutorial presents a small checker that fetches a page, follows the alternate links it lists, and reports missing return links, missing self-references, malformed codes and relative URLs. It relies only on the Python standard library and draws its rules from Google's guidance on localized versions. Key rules include listing every version including the default, using fully qualified URLs, requiring reciprocal links, and using valid ISO language and region codes such as GB rather than UK. The script checks only the HTML head method, not HTTP headers or sitemaps.
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