Auditing Hreflang Tags for International Sites Just Got Easier

This week Screaming Frog released several new crawl features in their 7.0 update. Among the new features, they added the ability to automatically crawl hreflang tags and easily export any pages with errors. For any SEO folks working on International sites, this is a huge plus.

Hreflang Attributes Added To Crawls
In the past, checking a site’s hreflang tags was a very manual (and fairly painful) process that involved setting up custom extractions within Screaming Frog, exporting the crawl to excel, and further piecing together the data in excel in order to get a meaningful view of any issues within the hreflang implementation.

Thanks to Screaming Frog’s latest update, this process is now entirely automated. Simply check the Extract Hreflang option under Spider Configuration before starting a site crawl, and the SEO spider will crawl all hreflang attributes found on the site.

Once the crawl is complete, click on the new Hreflang tab to review and export the crawl. In this tab, you can choose from various filters to check for common issues that might have occurred during hreflang implementation, including missing confirmation links and incorrect language codes.

Screaming Frog also added four custom reports (Under the top level Reports menu, click on Hreflang reports) so that you can easily export error pages in bulk.

Needless to say, we are very excited for this update. This feature should save a lot of time and energy for International SEO auditing moving forward.