Why am I facing hreflang tag issues on my online store?

Technical Q&A
,
1

I am getting issues with my hreflang tags on my Shopify store, specifically…

  • Broken hreflang URL
  • No self-referencing hreflang

This is what I have tried inside theme.liquid:

<head>
  <meta charset="utf-8">
  <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge,chrome=1">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1,viewport-fit=cover">
  <meta name="theme-color" content="{{ settings.color_secondary }}">
  
  
  {%- if canonical_url != blank -%}
    <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}">
    <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" hreflang="en-us">
    <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" hreflang="en-gb">
  {%- endif -%}

Can anyone help me out and let me know what I am doing wrong?

Here is the issues popping up in SEMrush letting me know that I have hreflang conflicts and what and where they are.

Screenshot 2023-07-04 at 09.51.07.png
Screenshot 2023-07-04 at 09.51.07.png1762×1596 464 KB

Screenshot 2023-07-04 at 09.51.31.png
Screenshot 2023-07-04 at 09.51.31.png1904×1222 326 KB

2

I suppose you are using Shopify Payments. Unless you have an advanced use case, you should not have to worry about hreflang tag attributes, Shopify automatically adds them in the tag for you based on the available languages and regions used by your store.

You can see on this screen capture there are 5 of them, including the default one:

MaxDesign_0-1688630652710.png
MaxDesign_0-1688630652710.png1564×714 355 KB

So yours are duplicate, what’s more they use a canonical rel attribute instead of the rel alternate attribute. From what I can see, I’d say you shoud most likely remove the code you added and leave it as it was initially, which I suppose are those 2 lines:
3

Hey Max,

I took out the two lines. Although, Shopify automatically does this SEMrush and Google are both detecting hreflang errors how can I fix these issues as they directly effect my SEO.

4

I am having the same issue with SEMRush. Were you able to resolve this?