Your hreflang says English-only. Does your language switcher agree?
I run a maintenance sweep over my own site every day. Yesterday it found 1,474 dead internal links that had been sitting there in plain sight, on 737 pages, and every automated check I had was green. The cause is a bug class I have not seen written up, so here it is. Two places encode "which languages does this page have" A partially translated site has, whether you planned it or not, two…
A maintenance sweep of a website revealed 1,474 dead internal links on 737 pages, despite automated checks reporting green status. The issue stemmed from a bug where language switcher buttons on English-only pages pointed to non-existent Chinese URLs. The hreflang tags on the site were correct, but the human-readable language switcher did not account for the language availability.
The bug remained undetected because all checks returned 200 status codes, and the broken links were only visible when manually browsing the Chinese versions of pages. The solution was to create a single source of truth listing the English-only paths, which the language switcher consulted to render only the appropriate buttons. This fix eliminated the dead links and ensured consistency between the website's crawler-facing directory and human-readable UI.
The key takeaway is that when multiple subsystems answer the same question, one of them is likely to be wrong, and thorough auditing of all link relationships is necessary to maintain a healthy website.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
