Empty href lang

[alishb1373]

Our site is a multilingual , and its our structure for different lang :

for en :domain.com/myPost

for Arabic : domain.com/ar/myPost

and most of the page and post in main site , have Arabic version also.

and we want to generate href lang tag for all pages and posts.(for both language)

and its my problem ;

if i have a post or page in main site( English ), but the Arabic  version not published yet

and the href lang in English site pointed to the arabic url page (the page that doesn't exist yet)

{arabic version almost will publish after 4-5 days }

is it harmful for our SEO ? that href lang point to the URL that doesnt exist?

[effectdigital]

That is technically an error. If a page or post doesn't exist in a certain language, hreflangs pointing to it (from other pages) shouldn't exist. When the post is published, then the hreflangs should be written. It's probably not going to destroy your sites rankings by itself, but in SEO, the second you start making concessions on one front - people argue that you should make more concessions in other areas. Before you know it, you have a big tangle of loads of different errors. Optimisation, is about making things 'optimum'. It's not optimum to have hreflang errors like that

[WebQuest]

Hi,

If its only a few days until the Arabic pages are published, I would wait until then to push out the hreflang implementation.

Although hreflnag is not a ranking signal, having it implemented with pages that are not published yet would generate internal 404 pages, which can cause a few issues for the site.