Close syntax missing in Hreflang Tag

[RajMankotia]

Hi @lydiapuric,
Please check the hreflang tag for all where we implemented we did not close the tag with "/>"

in old we have like this-

--   |   |   |   |   |   |

This we have now-

Please fix this.

[lydiapuric]

@RajMankotia As far as I know it doesn't matter if tags are self-closing when they've been processed by the DOM and otherwise the browser itself would take care of that. What is the impact you see?

[RajMankotia]

I am getting this error -

and if I am checking on the web it shows -

they close at the end by "/>" but we close like this ">"

Please add "/" in last "/>".

[lydiapuric]

I will address this issue today, thanks Raj

[RajMankotia]

or we can try and check if it resolves this then it's fine.

[jose-correia]

@RajMankotia

• how are you accessing the page, how can i reproduce the error?

Adding this self-closing tags manually is not an option, since even if we do, the browser will remove them. This happens according to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Void_element

I checked the old website in https://live-md30.pantheonsite.io/ and I also dont see any self-closing tags />

[RajMankotia]

It's from old website -

and it's that we implemented on migrated

at the end .com/" />
Currently, we have .com/">

I don't know more about coding but everywhere I see this tag applied or suggested on web they have closed it with a forward slash ( / ) at the end, but in our case, it's not.

[mhaack]

@RajMankotia what is the tool you use to check which complains?

Also, please double check on the old site: if you do view source yes there is a /> at the end. However if you do inspect the link tags also just end with >. This is correct according the HTML standards as @jose-correia shared the links and the browser corrects it.

Additionally you can test the following lines in any browser console:

const link = document.createElement('link');
link.rel = "alternate";
link.hreflang = 'ko';
link.href = 'https://ko.moleculardevices.com';
console.log(link);

You will see the link tag has no /> at the end.

[RajMankotia]

Hi, it shows an error for x-default - “no return tags”. will you please check for rest of i shows all ok

[RajMankotia]

Hi @mhaack
Even SEMrush also shows the error -

[alexcarol]

From what I see in the original site the links were already present in the html, could the issue be that we're adding them with javascript?

[RajMankotia]

There is a chance that different syntax is used in JavaScript for the hreflang tag. It is like the old HTML that we used.

[mhaack]

From what I see in the original site the links were already present in the html, could the issue be that we're adding them with javascript?

Yes that is the case, as these check tools don't execute JS

[jose-correia]

@mhaack @RajMankotia effectively when I do a curl GET request on the site page, the response does not contain any hreflang tags
Probably they are being added afterwards.

This could be the issue since the tool GETs the page, doesnt see the tags and reports the error

[mhaack]

@jose-correia yes they are added client side

[RajMankotia]

@jose-correia got it but eventually it should get verified by Semrush as this is the same tool used and suggested by business. @mhaack as discussed in last call can we add it via meta tag?