International SEO: Hreflang Horror Stories

The "Global" Site Fallacy

Many US companies simply clone their site to a .co.uk domain and expect it to rank. Without precise hreflang implementation, Google sees this as duplicate content, not localization.

Return Tags Matter

The most common error we see is the missing return tag. If Page A points to Page B as its German alternate, Page B must point back to Page A. If the handshake fails, the signal is ignored.