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That's great. Thanks so much for your help James

Many thanks! I was looking for examples of issues with this setup. Some stakeholders find the dynamic solution appealing (as it is much easier to set up for us), thereby forgoing the opportunity to set up the site correctly for international indexing and ranking. I would like to be able to illustrate the potential shortcomings. Many thanks again!

No, it doesn't change my answer, but it's a good distinction to make. It sounds like the international expansion is in process. If the client needs geo-targeted content (sounds like they might), the countries need to be treated differently. Each subfolder as it's own site really. But it sounds like the translation is a good place to start for the time being. For the mobile, my answer remains the same. There isn't anything other than making the translated content mobile or responsive that will help the traffic.

Are you especially concerned with ranking those pages?

Hi Joe, thanks. I had the same thoughts and already talked to them. It is only offered to enterprise clients of cloudflare and requires an ICP number which in turn requires a company located in China.

Have you confirmed that Googlebot is being redirected as well and it's for sure a 301 redirect? If the redirects are IP based, it's possible Google figured out that there is an IP redirect (which is NOT recommended) and therefore, for a brand search, are giving the main domain with the US content - which is all they can see with an IP based redirect. For your third question: Stop the redirect. Use a JS prompt to ask people to set a location preference and set a cookie based on that. Use sitemaps to push all country content to the SEs. Think about a responsive site rather than an m.domain.com - but if you must have that, make sure to make a separate sitemap for that and claim it in Webmaster Tools. Ensure that your mobile content is marked up correctly and if needed, the right canonicals are in place.

Okay, great.  Thanks for your responses.  It sounds like I should be okay using the same content and since I will be changing to metric units and will be using localized terms and different folders/paths.

Hi. Interesting, I didn't see that article. Well, then, I guess, it's matter of preference. I'd still go with different sitemaps. cause managing them individually allows script and code based automation.

HI! As the previous answer says, you must always present all the countries and languages (or just languages) related hreflang annotations as many are the multicountry/multilingual version of your site. So your own first question (My question is, do both of these tags need to be on both the Spanish and English version of the page?) is the correct answer.

Should we even have a /en-us/ version when our root domain is the default version, in english, and targeted to US primarily? Hi Andrew, The general rule of thumb here, is if your target is the US and language English, then this should sit at the root of the site rather than within a location identifier - so from what you say, this is implemented incorrectly. Correct this and it should correct your issues. However, you will need to set some 301's so that any pages that are indexed under /en-us/ will forward on to the new and correct URL. I hope this helps. -Andy

Thanks Mirko, Yup, I have this done on my site It seems to be on a general scale that Google chooses to ignore Irish sites even .ie sites over UK and US results. Very frustrating for Irish businesses and buyers. We've only a population of 4m and it would be nice to have the Irish online economy to work a little better!

The answer given by Dirk is correct. In the hreflang annotations you can indicate whatever URL, no matter it is on a subdomain or different domain name.

The one issue I see is that at least for the homepage, these two sites are identical. You have so many different geo-target sites, but between two sites of the same language regardless of location, does anything change? I'm seeing no differences on the homepage so I need to ask. This might be part of why .be is cached for .nl, you're not giving them something new to index. They are hreflang'd as well, which is telling them even more that the content is the same. I am going to assume that .be launched before .nl, or has gotten more play in the search results. Something is making it the go to for Dutch.

In that case you can eventually rely on IP detection, and if someone from Belgium is entering on your site, then you can fire an alert, somehow as Amazon does: "We detected that you are visiting us from Belgium, so we suggest you to visit the French version of our web site". This, though, does not solve the problem of Belgians speaking Flemish

Good Answer Tim, but I am going to add a bit. Since there are varying services, Tim's recommendation of domain.com/us and domain.com/uk is spot on. If you don't want to change URLs, I understand. You can keep the current URLs, you can geo-target the root to the UK and /us to the US. This route is easier to scale and if you grow each country as it launches, the domain gets stronger which helps each expansion in the years to come. Now, if you are geo-targeting, there won't be much need for hreflang. If there are some product pages that are IDENTICAL across the two countries other than a few changed words, you can add HREFLANG. Technically speaking you wouldn't need it if the content were written and the pages crafted to each country, but until you get to that point, you can use HREFLANG for the pages that are duplicated. Mind you, this isn't best for your audience, but I get that for starters, that's easier. Do test the pages in each market to see if any modifications can be made for each market. I don't recommend launching a .co.uk unless your customers/market demand it. That's a lot of marketing work to build up each one. It sounds like your best bet is / geotarget to GB using Search Console, create a /us for the US, claim that in Search Console and geotarget to the US. Then use hreflang for any duplicated content. Hope that helps!

Hi Gianluca. Thanks so much for the detailed explanation! I appreciate your taking the time to provide all that great info. Unfortunately, I'm not sure what to do here. I understand the client made a mistake in launching one site for all of Europe, but I know they'll never pay to build out separate sites for each target country (at least not right now). At the risk of sounding like an annoying client, what if I was to use the "en-us" hreflang tag on the U.S. site and just "en" on the English version of the European site as a temporary fix? (Then once we launch the translated versions of the European site – in Spanish, French, and Italian – we'd tag them as "es," "fr," and "it.") Would that help at all with my issue of having the European site outrank the U.S. site in the U.S. SERPs? Thanks again for taking the time to try to steer me in the right direction. From your answers, I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what we should do in an ideal world. Unfortunately, this situation is not ideal, so I'm looking for a relatively quick band-aid fix... but I'm getting the sinking feeling that there's no such thing.

Hi Carmen, Thans for the response. No, I'd like to target french in france, fr-FR. That for french, but for english i just want to target the language and not the country, just /en/. So, I'd like to know if i can follow different strategies in webmaster tools, targeting country for /fr/ subdomain and language for /en/ subdomain. Thanks!

I have an additional question, that I haven't been able to find an answer for elsewhere. How does Google determine which version is the right one to show for each user? Is it by IP? I mean, in my example we could have an american user that is on vacation in UK. Would he see the .com or .uk result? It could also be a norwegian user on vacation in Denmark, would he see the .no or .dk results? (danish and norwegian is fairly similar and has a lot of common spellings).

Hey Mike, One of my friend who owns a software company used their services couple of months ago and he was quite satisfied with the quality they provided. Let's see what other experts suggests.

I visited your site and saw how the local "Irish address" has been removed. Did you see changes? On the other hand, remember that a migration (especially from http to https) always has a period when traffic goes down. Finally, I suggest you to consider others things that maybe are pushing Google improving your IE traffic and devaluate your USA/UK one: backlinks. Is your link profile mostly composed by backlink from Irish websites? If it is so, that an extremely strong geotargeting signal, and you should have to start earning links and brand awareness also in USA and UK.