Validate International SEO Hreflang and Locale Targeting

Required inputs

Have these details available before following the usage instructions.

• List of markets, languages, locale codes, and intended canonical URL patterns.
• Representative URL clusters across locales, including default or x-default pages if used.
• Crawl exports, rendered HTML snippets, sitemap files, robots directives, canonical tags, redirect behavior, and indexability status.
• CMS, framework, template, or routing rules that generate localized pages and tags.
• Known symptoms from Search Console, logs, SERP observations, analytics, or stakeholder reports.
• Launch stage, production constraints, change history, and required acceptance criteria.
• Named locale and market owners, canonical ownership rules, crawl and indexing evidence dates, and current authoritative search-engine guidance with source links and access dates.

How to use this Skill

When to use:
- A multilingual or multi-region site is launching, migrating, or changing localized URL templates.
- Search engines are indexing the wrong locale, consolidating pages incorrectly, or showing unexpected regional results.
- A team needs to validate hreflang tags, XML sitemap annotations, canonical relationships, redirects, and indexability across locale clusters.
- International SEO issues may affect organic visibility, duplicate content handling, or user routing.

When not to use:
- Do not use for general keyword research or content strategy without technical international SEO evidence.
- Do not use for legal localization, translation quality, or market-entry decisions except as supporting SEO evidence.
- Do not use when no URL samples, crawl data, rendered HTML, sitemap data, or implementation details are available.
- Do not treat the output as a guarantee of search ranking or search-engine behavior.

Instructions:
1. Use the linked source prompt AMO-P-000252 as the international SEO QA scaffold; feed it the URL, crawl, sitemap, and rendered-output evidence instead of copying its full text into the answer.
2. Separate supplied crawl facts, page evidence, implementation assumptions, inferred risks, and missing information.
3. Group URLs into hreflang clusters and check reciprocity, self-references, x-default use, locale-code validity, locale ownership, canonical and hreflang interaction, redirect stability, crawlability, indexability, and sitemap consistency against current authoritative search-engine guidance.
4. Identify contradictions such as hreflang pointing to non-indexable, redirected, canonicalized-away, blocked, missing, duplicated, or wrong-language URLs.
5. Prioritize findings by affected market, template scope, crawlability/indexability risk, implementation complexity, and reversibility.
6. Define concrete remediation options and post-fix acceptance checks for representative templates and high-value URL clusters.
7. Require human review before publishing template changes, sitemap changes, canonical changes, or redirects that may affect production SEO traffic.
8. Avoid ranking guarantees; frame recommendations as risk reduction and validation steps.

Expected output:
An international SEO validation brief with cluster-level findings, prioritized technical risks, remediation recommendations, acceptance-test checklist, unresolved evidence gaps, and release or publication review gates.

Constraints and boundaries:
- Do not invent crawl results, locale mappings, Search Console data, or rendered HTML.
- Do not recommend broad URL, canonical, redirect, or sitemap changes without evidence of scope and impact.
- Do not guarantee indexing, rankings, traffic recovery, or AI/search engine treatment.
- Respect production release controls and require human approval for SEO-impacting changes.
- Keep translation/content-quality observations separate from technical hreflang validation unless directly evidenced.

Powered by an Amo.ng Prompt

International SEO Hreflang Validation Workflow

Open the linked prompt to use the instructions that power this Skill.

Completion criteria

Complete when:
- Each finding references a supplied URL, crawl row, sitemap entry, rendered tag, redirect result, or search evidence.
- The audit checks reciprocity, self-reference, locale-code validity, canonical compatibility, indexability, and sitemap consistency.
- Priority levels reflect scope, severity, reversibility, and business relevance.
- Acceptance checks are specific enough to run after implementation.
- Unverified assumptions and missing samples are explicitly listed.