How to fix it
Use an ISO 639-1 language code, optionally followed by an ISO 3166-1 region code: en, en-gb, pt-br. The regions Google accepts are the two-letter country codes.
When it is not a problem
The language part is ISO 639-1 and the region is ISO 3166-1; the mismatch that catches people is the United Kingdom being GB, not UK. One wrong code usually appears in every page of that language.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityWarning. It costs traffic or clarity without stopping anything, which is where most real work lives.
- DetectionDetected on a single page while crawling it, then grouped with the other pages under the same URL pattern.
- GroupingEvery page with this finding under the same URL pattern becomes one cause, with a confidence taken from how much of the pattern is affected. 400 of 400 is a template; 6 of 14 is phrased as a question. Causes are ranked by the impressions behind their pages.
- LandingThe affected URLs stay under cheap watch. When this finding is gone from all of them, the fix is marked landed without anyone reporting the deploy.
- VerdictAt landing, comparable untouched URLs are frozen as a control set. Twenty-eight days later the two are compared, and the fix can come back as having done nothing — all four verdicts reach the report.
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