Hreflang architecture and the ccTLD-versus-subfolder decision

A missing return tag invalidates the pair, not one side of it. If your Spanish page declares the French alternate and the French page does not declare the Spanish one back, Google discards both directions. That is why so many teams report hreflang as implemented and see nothing change for two quarters. The usual cause is a CMS that builds alternates from each page's own translation table instead of from one shared cluster identifier, so any page that was unpublished, redirected or created late breaks every sibling that referenced it, silently, with no error anywhere in your stack. What this engagement decides: Two questions, both answered in writing with the consequences attached. First, whether your markets belong on separate country domains, on subfolders of one domain, or on the mix you inherited from three previous agencies and have never audited end to end. Second, whether the hreflang you already have is doing anything at all. How the domain question usually goes: Often the answer is do not consolidate. A .de carrying a decade of German press links and directory citations does not hand that authority to a subfolder on the .com because a redirect exists. Consolidation buys you one authority pool and one Search Console property, and it costs six to nine months of unstable rankings in your best market with no guarantee at the end. We will say this even when the board has already been told the migration is happening. If what you want is the decision validated rather than examined, hire somebody else now and save the fee. What gets checked, and how: A crawl in Screaming Frog with the hreflang cluster report, then a second pass over the XML sitemap alternates, because head tags and sitemap entries routinely disagree on the same site and only one of them is being read. Codes validated against ISO 639-1 and ISO 3166-1 alpha-2: en-UK and es-LA are not codes, and the CMS field that accepted them will accept anything. Self-reference present in every cluster. Canonicals pointing to self and never across languages, since a canonical to the English version removes the localised page from the index no matter how correct its hreflang is. An x-default assigned to the page an unhandled locale should actually land on, which is rarely the US homepage. Alternates that 301, 404 or sit behind robots.txt, all three of which are dropped without notice. Finally a Googlebot log sample, to confirm the crawler reaches the country versions at all rather than being 302'd on IP into one of them, which is the most common reason a market never enters the index. What you receive: A cluster map as XLSX with one row per URL and the exact failure named. A decision memo of six to ten pages stating the option we recommend, what it costs, what it risks and who owns each step. An implementation specification written in the form your developers' ticket system takes, not as prose they have to translate. A URL-level redirect map if consolidation is what we recommend. One call with whoever has to defend the decision internally, because the memo will be read by people who were not on the project. What is not included: We do not write or translate content. That is the other service on this profile and it is separate on purpose. No link building to the surviving domain, no paid-media geo-targeting, no CMS development. We specify, your team or your platform partner implements, and we retest afterwards, which every package includes. Registrar and DNS stay with you. Who this is not for: Single-country businesses. Two-language sites where subfolders are obviously right and you already know it, in which case a validator and an afternoon will do. Anyone whose real constraint is a legal entity per market that forces separate domains, since that is a tax and liability question settled above our pay grade. And anyone who needs a signature on a decision already made. Timing: If a migration date exists, give us the date before anything else and we will say whether the work fits before quoting. We have declined engagements four weeks out from a peak-season code freeze and will do it again.