• White Hat SEO

  Managing hreflang for EN/DE site that’s adding new lang (PT)

  Posted by StephanHolz on September 17, 2025 at 12:18 pm

  

  Hi everyone,

  I run a site that’s fully available in English (en) and German (de). We’re now adding Portuguese (pt) because several new offices are in Brazil and Portugal.

  Challenge: some office pages will exist only in English and Portuguese; there will be no German version for those specific offices.

  Questions

  1. When a German-speaking visitor lands on a PT-only office page (via internal link or Google), should we:
     • keep them on the PT page,
     • auto-redirect to EN, or
     • show PT but display an “also available in English” prompt?
  2. Any hreflang best practices or common pitfalls when combining en, de and pt versions, especially when one language is missing for certain URLs?

  Current setup

  • Separate URLs per language (example.com/en/, /de/, /pt/).
  • Canonicals point to the self-language version.
  • Hreflang tags are generated automatically but they keep throwing “no return-tag” and “language conflict” warnings in GSC.
  • All insights or examples are appreciated!

  hreflang pitfalls i found to watch (and learned the hard way)

  • Always provide a self-referencing hreflang tag for every URL.
  • Make sure each language/region pair is reciprocal: if /pt/office-a references /en/office-a, the EN page must reference the PT page back.
  • Exact matching URL paths; stray trailing slashes or uppercase letters break reciprocity.
  • Do not mix language-only codes (pt) with region codes (pt-br, pt-pt) unless you cover every variant consistently across your sitemap and tags.
  • Keep canonical URLs and hreflang URLs identical; mismatches create “canonical vs. hreflang” conflicts in Google Search Console.
  • Include all language versions for a page in the same cluster; omitting one causes “missing return link” errors for the others.
  • Update your XML sitemap with hreflang entries; large sites relying solely on HTML tags often run into sampling issues.

  StephanHolz replied 12 hours, 56 minutes ago 1 Member · 0 Replies
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