Google Helps You Check Your Work With International Targeting Tool

If your site caters to multiple languages you'll be happy to hear that Google Webmaster Tools has just released an International Targeting tool aimed at alerting you to problems within your hreflang annotations. Hreflang annotations indicate to Google that you have multiple language options available for your Web pages and they're easy to get wrong. The tool identifies two of the most common errors that Google encounters, which are:

• Missing return links happen when annotations aren't confirmed by the pages they are pointing to. If Google finds a page that links to another without a return link the tool will report where and when it was found. The tool will also point out where the return link should be located.
• Incorrect hreflang values - Google only accepts hreflang attributes in the language code in ISO 639-1 format such as "es", or a combination of language and country code such as "es-AR", where the country code is in ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 format. If the attributes aren't in the recommended formats the tool will alert you of the error and make suggestions to fix them.

Google has also moved the geographic targeting settings to the new section within Webmaster Tools so that all International and language tools can be found in the same spot. If you'd like to read their official announcement you can do so here.