Google's John Mueller confirmed I think again, that hreflang link tags do not have to be in hierarchical order. When asked about this, John said that "it doesn't matter" on Twitter.
Here are those tweets:
Doesn't matter.
— John Mueller is mostly not here 🐀 (@JohnMu) November 9, 2022
Hreflang is an HTML attribute used to specify the language and geographical targeting of a webpage. If you have multiple versions of the same page in different languages, you can use the hreflang tag to tell search engines like Google about these variations. This helps them to serve the correct version to their users, via Ahrefs.
The official Google documentation on this is over here.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
