How to fix it
Add <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="..."> pointing at the language-selector page or the version most visitors should get.
When it is not a problem
A site with two languages and no international audience beyond them loses little. The more languages and the more countries, the more the default decides who lands where.
How Rankelle handles it
- SeverityInformational. Often correct as it stands, and reported so you can see the pattern rather than so you can clear it.
- 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.
Try it on your own site, free
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