For SEOs who are dealing with international issues for a website, there is some great news from Google.  Google Webmaster Tools has announced that International Targeting is now available to all users.  International Targeting, which was previously in beta, enables advertisers to debug errors with hreflang implementation.

The markup hreflang, sometimes referred to as href-lang, is still very new for webmasters and there has definitely been a learning curve for this particular markup compared to the many other markups webmasters use regularly.

Google regularly sees two types of errors stemming from the incorrect usage of hreflang, missing return links as well as incorrect hreflang values. Both of these will now show up as errors under “International Targeting” in the “Search Traffic” area of Webmaster Tools.

Debugging markup is one of the more complicated webmaster jobs, especially for the uncommon ones where there are not an abundance of available checkers to ensure everything is done correctly.

This tool was previously in beta, but it is now available to all Google Webmaster Tools accounts.