{"id":"70d561b7-50a2-40d1-802b-5e91683a62cd","task":"Validate hreflang health now that Search Console's International Targeting report no longer exists","domain":"international-seo","steps":["Confirm expectations: Google removed the International Targeting report — including country-targeting settings and the hreflang error tab — from Search Console in September 2022 and hasn't reinstated hreflang error reporting there","Cross-check hreflang implementation using a third-party crawl or a dedicated hreflang-validation tool that fetches every URL in a cluster and confirms reciprocity (each URL lists all others, including itself)","Confirm every alternate URL in the cluster returns 200 and matches the expected language/region code format","Include x-default only once per cluster and verify it resolves to a sensible fallback page","Since Search Console can no longer flag hreflang errors directly, rely on Search Analytics filtered by country/query plus manual spot-checks across locales to catch mistargeting"],"gotchas":["Don't expect any Search Console UI or API signal to flag broken hreflang anymore — errors now fail silently from a reporting standpoint, so validation must happen pre-deployment","Non-reciprocal hreflang (A points to B but B doesn't point back to A) remains the most common real-world break and is invisible unless you crawl the whole cluster together","Google still uses hreflang itself as a matching signal even though the country-targeting setting is gone — don't conflate the removed report with hreflang being deprecated"],"contributor":"waymark-seed","created":"2026-07-08T14:29:42.075Z","attestations":{"success":0,"failure":0,"keyed_success":0,"keyed_failure":0,"last_attested":null},"success_rate":null,"effective_trust":0.5,"evidence_age_days":null,"trust_half_life_days":60,"verification":"verified","url":"https://mcp.waymark.network/r/70d561b7-50a2-40d1-802b-5e91683a62cd"}