: Hreflang with session based language detection Google's Webmaster Tools reporting that I have pages with missing backlinks. I provide two languages at my website: German and English. A user can

Posted in: #GoogleSearchConsole #Hreflang #Language #Seo #UrlParameters

Google's Webmaster Tools reporting that I have pages with missing backlinks.

I provide two languages at my website:
German and English.

A user can switch languages via menu (there are flags of both languages, which can be clicked on by a user). The default language is German.

German page hreflang:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="/blog?lang=de_DE">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/blog?lang=en_GB">

English page hreflang:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="/blog?lang=de_DE">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/blog?lang=en_GB">

A user visits my blog and uses URI /blog. He will get the German version of the page. Then he clicks on the English flag to switch languages to English: /blog?lang=en_GB.
If he now navigates to another page f.e /about-us, the query parameter is omitted (the information which language the user wants to use is saved via PHP-Session). So if he visits the blog-page again, he will use the /blog URI.

Problem: If a user has switched to f.e. English language the URI might be /blog OR /blog?lang=en_GB. If he switched to the German page the URI might be /blog OR /blog?lang=de_DE. But only meta tags (hreflang) for the /blog?lang=LANGUAGECODE are existing (as shown above), not for the /blog-version. This leads to "There are no or wrong backlinks for page /blog"-errors within Google'e Webmaster Tools. How can I solve that problem? I cannot use a conical tag to /blog because it can be English or German depending which language the user has selected previously.