“I have come to the conclusion that hreflang needs to die in a pit of blue fire,” says AJ Kohn.
Unfortunately, hreflang is like a Walking Dead zombie.
Hreflang creates a link graph for each cluster of pages.
Graph analysis is highly resource intensive.
I get more from ensuring language is correct and the content is different by region.
If your women’s high heels page in the US has the same selection as in Italy you’re not going to do very well.
And at that point the pages aren’t equivalent.
And I wouldn’t implement hreflangs in that instance.