Auto-generated sitemap contains hreflangs x-default definition

In the last couple of months, Webflow changed the way they generate sitemaps. They include now, for each URL, a hreflangs for x-default as a self-reference.

Our website has pages in 2 languages and we manually defined for each page the hreflangs tags (for en, ro and x-default).

Usually, for a page in romanian for example, we define:
en - link to the page translation in English
ro - self-reference link
x-default - link to the page translation in English

Now, with the Webflow sitemap changes, there is a new
x-default - self-reference link

And this messes up our hreflangs definitions all over our website :slight_smile:

I attached a couple of links:

  • link to our sitemap from February this year
  • link to our current sitemap (with hreflangs x-default defined as a self-reference for all the pages on our website)
  • 2 screenshots with the problem (double definition of x-default)

My only current solution is manually generating my sitemap and resolving the hreflang conflict. What do you think?



It’s great to see these behind-the-scenes adjustments, they are a good indication that the multilingual feature buildout is making progress.

Yes, technically the hreflang specified in sitemap.xml disagrees with the hreflangs in your custom heads- however your page metas will take precedence. In general, sitemap.xml serves as guidance, but it is not authoritative. Unless you’re getting errors from Google Search Console, I would not waste time on this.

Also note that your duplicate HTML element is invalidating your HTML <html lang="ro">.

If you really want to control your sitemap.xml, then manually generating it would be the easiest way to control the content it’s reporting.