Redirect chains quietly destroy hreflang clusters

Redirect chains quietly destroy hreflang clusters

Hreflang alternates must resolve to a 200 status directly. Not after one hop, not after a language redirect, directly. Every redirect in the chain is a point where Google may stop following and drop the alternate.

Where chains come from:

— HTTP to HTTPS migration where hreflang tags were never updated
— Trailing slash normalization that redirects /de to /de/
— Country detection that bounces /fr/ visitors to /fr-fr/ based on IP
— Old URL structures kept alive by a redirect map after a redesign

Each of these looks harmless. Combined, a single alternate might go through three hops before landing. Google's documentation is explicit that the target must be the final URL.

How to audit: crawl your site, export every hreflang href, then request each one and record the status code. Anything that is not 200 goes into a fix list. Sort by the number of pages that reference the broken target. The top of that list is usually one template mistake affecting thousands of URLs.