Reports began to emerge last month that Google was privately beta testing a new feature in Webmaster Tools, which was a href lang debugging tool. Google announced this week that the tool is now available to everyone.

If you actively target users in more than one country, then there’s a good chance you’re already familiar with rel-alternate-hreflang. If you’re not familiar, the best way to describe it is an annotation that enables Google and other search engines to serve the correct language or regional version of pages to searchers

A problem with these annotations is making sure they are usable by search engines can be challenging, especially on sites with many pages. That’s why Google is releasing a feature that promises to make debugging rel-alternate-hreflang annotations easier.

You will now be able to identify two of the most common issues with hreflang annotations using the Language Targeting section in the International Targeting feature. These two common issues include:

1. Missing return links

Annotations must be confirmed from the pages they are pointing to. If page A links to page B, page B must link back to page A, otherwise the annotations may not be interpreted correctly.

For each error of this kind, Google reports where and when the errors were detected, as well as where the return link is expected to be.

2. Incorrect hreflang values

The value of the hreflang attribute must either be a 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 Google’s indexing systems detect language or country codes that are not in these formats, Google will provide example URLs to help you fix them.

In addition, Google has moved the geographic targeting setting to this new areas of Webmaster Tools, so that you can find all information relevant to international and multilingual targeting in the same place.