Mistake That Can Wipe Out Your International SEO

I recently worked with a website that had a huge indexing problem. The cause? A small mistake that was easy to miss.

The site had content in multiple languages. Only the main language was ranking. Google completely ignored the other languages. It was like those pages didn't exist at all.

This is a common issue that can kill your international SEO efforts. Even when you have great content and quality translations, one technical misstep can make everything invisible to search engines.

When Google Only Sees One Language

Let me show you what I found on one website recently.

Pages in English, German, and Spanish. But no canonical tags. No hreflang tags. Nothing telling Google how these language versions relate to each other.

To make it worse, the website also had a broken sitemap. With this combination of issues, the translations were hidden from Google's eyes. Even though Google could follow links and discover these translations that way, it didn't.

I see this problem pretty often. Companies invest money into translations but forget to tell Google that these translations exist and who they're for.

One important thing to note: this issue also affects AI Search and AI tools, not just traditional search.

What Hreflang Tags Actually Do

Hreflang tags tell search engines which language version to show to which audience.

A proper setup looks like this:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/product/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="https://example.com/de/product/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://example.com/es/product/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/product/" />

Keep in mind that each language version needs all hreflang tags pointing to all other versions, including itself. Yes, the English page needs a hreflang pointing to the English page. This self-reference is required.

Each page also needs a canonical tag pointing to itself.

The German page should have:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/de/product/" />

Not pointing to the main language:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/product/" />

That second option tells Google to ignore the German page entirely. Developers sometimes think there should be one "main" canonical for all language versions. That's wrong.

The Correct Implementation

Every language version needs a self-referencing canonical tag. The German page canonicals to itself. The Spanish page canonicals to itself. No exceptions.

Then you need complete hreflang tag sets on every page. Every language version must reference every other language version, plus itself, plus an x-default fallback.

Make sure the hreflang URLs match your actual URLs exactly. Trailing slashes matter. HTTPS vs HTTP matters. WWW vs non-WWW matters. If you read my previous episode about the eight versions of the same page, you know how important URL consistency is.

After implementing, be patient. Google needs time to recrawl and reprocess. Expect two to four weeks before seeing changes. Sometimes it happens even earlier.

Check It Now

The website I mentioned at the beginning? After fixing these issues, their German and Spanish pages started appearing in search results within two weeks.

Even perfect content gets buried when Google can't figure out which version to show to whom. Technical foundation failures kill international SEO faster than bad translations.