Crawl budget and hreflang: how a markup mistake slows indexing across every locale

Crawl budget and hreflang: how a markup mistake slows indexing across every locale

Every hreflang alternate is a URL Google will eventually request to verify the return tag. With ten locales, one page becomes ten fetches. With a mistake that generates alternates for URLs that redirect or 404, those fetches are wasted, and the crawl capacity for your real pages shrinks.

Signs this is happening to you:

— Crawl stats show a large share of requests ending in 3xx or 4xx
— New pages in secondary locales take weeks to appear in the index while primary locale pages appear in days
— Log files show Googlebot hitting the same broken alternate over and over from different referring pages

Typical sources of waste: alternates built from a locale list that includes markets you have not launched yet, alternates pointing to staging hostnames, and alternates for pages that are noindexed in some locales.

Fix in this order: remove alternates to any URL that is not a live, indexable, 200 page. Then check that the cluster only includes locales that actually exist. Then watch the crawl stats for a month.