Technical eligibility, control 10 of 20
T-10 Keep language and regional versions coherent
Each locale should have a clear URL and accurate language, regional facts and alternate relationships. Do not automatically consolidate genuinely different language versions.
- Priority
- High priority.
- Hard gate
- No
- Change class
- APPROVAL_REQUIRED: Required exact authority must be valid before the consequential action.
- Quality bucket
- Technical eligibility
Why it matters
If the page language, canonical, hreflang and navigation disagree, users can be sent to the wrong language or region version. Search engines may also treat versions as duplicates or pick the wrong one to show. Low-quality automatic translation adds a content quality problem, which Google's spam policies take seriously.
Evidence to review
- Locale inventory, hreflang graph, rendered language checks and market-specific price/service facts.
How to implement
- Validate supported language/region codes and reciprocal alternates where used.
- Map each annotation to an accessible equivalent, not a generic homepage.
- Check canonical conflicts and crawlable language selectors.
- Decide same-language regional canonicalisation deliberately rather than demanding self-canonicals for every duplicate.
How UltimateSEO checks this
Automated. A check in the scan sets PASS or FAIL for this control, and reports UNKNOWN or BLOCKED when its input is missing.
The check looks at: hreflang reciprocity and lang attributes across crawled language versions; marked not applicable when the site has a single language and no hreflang.
States used: PASS, FAIL, UNKNOWN, NOT_APPLICABLE or BLOCKED. UNKNOWN is never shown as a pass. How states work.
Sources
Part of The UltimateSEO Framework v4.3, catalogue dated 2026-10-14. Evidence states, control states and the publish gate are explained on the hub.