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R003: hreflang alternate set lacks any Arabic entry on an Arabic page

When a page lists its language versions with hreflang but leaves Arabic out, search engines cannot match Arabic searchers to it and may send them to another locale instead.

The check

Id
R003
Category
Document and metadata
Default severity
medium

When it fires

  1. mediummedium confidence

    The page is Arabic and publishes hreflang alternates, but none of them carries an Arabic tag. A page with no hreflang at all is left alone: that is a strategy choice, not a defect.

    Fix: Add <link rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" href="…self…"> (and regional variants if you have them) to the set.

What it leaves alone

A page with no hreflang at all, which is a strategy choice rather than a defect, and a set that already holds any Arabic tag, regional ones included.

Broken, then fixed

before.html
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/">
after.html
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="https://example.com/en/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="ar" href="https://example.com/ar/">

Check it by hand

Run [...document.querySelectorAll('link[rel=alternate][hreflang]')].map((l) => l.hreflang) in the DevTools console. If the list is not empty, it should include ar or a regional Arabic tag such as ar-SA.

What the report shows you

Each R003 finding carries the fields below that apply to it, so you can see why it fired without rerunning the scan.

hreflangs
Every hreflang alternate the page declares, each with its language tag and URL.

More document and metadata checks

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