The SEO Bug Hiding Inside Perfectly Valid Hreflang Tags

The Hebrew pages of a rare book dealer’s new site were live with dir="rtl" missing entirely. Prices and ISBNs ran backward. English author names embedded inside Hebrew titles landed on the wrong side of the sentence, and parentheses opened where they should have closed.

I was put on the site after launch to check it, expensive inventory, the kind of listing that can run into five figures, and RTL never made it into the build.

None of that needed a specialist to catch. Pull the page up next to how Google rendered the same text in a search result, and the mismatch was obvious in seconds.

Hreflang was worse, just quieter. It wasn’t there at all, on any of the localized pages.

Missing tags are the easy kind of broken. Grep the source, get zero results, you’re done, you know exactly what to fix.

Years later I found a version...

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