Gary Illyes clarified how Google handles hreflang and alternate URLs during canonicalization, explaining that these alternate versions aren’t indexed in the traditional sense.
This came up in a LinkedIn thread started by Faiez Javaid, who asked:
“If Google is choosing by itself one /lang/ as canonical and ignoring others showing in GSC as not indexed, then how can Google show other lang versions of the same page to the user in search results?”
Gary Illyes replied with a two-part explanation:
“There are two things at play:
- Alternate names: When we canonicalize a URL, the other URLs in its duplicate cluster from which it was chosen may become so-called alternate names. They may be used in search results if the user query deserves one of those alternate names. The most prominent use case is the ‘site:’ query. If you do a search like [site:], we may show a bunch of URLs that actually redirect; they’re not indexed in the proper sense; they’re just alternate names of a canonical URL.
- hreflang alternates become such alternate URLs; they’re not, in fact, indexed in the proper sense.”
This is a useful clarification for anyone confused about seeing language or region variants of a page appear in search results, despite Search Console reporting those URLs as “not indexed.” According to Illyes, this doesn’t mean those URLs are broken or being ignored they’re simply functioning as alternate names tied to the canonical version, and Google can still surface them in specific contexts, such as through hreflang or site: search queries.
