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The best way to go about this is to keep the URLs with the language in the structure. Redirect (301) the ones that don't have it to the ones that do. However, it sounds like that causes a problem. If the above isn't a possibility, use a canonical from the non-language URL to the one with it. Then do your HREFLANG in sitemaps, and only use the URLs with the language tag in the sitemaps. You can also do the coding on the page, just make sure the HREFLANG tags are not on the non-language pages. Example URL: http://www.test.com/boeken would have a canonical tag that points to http://www.test.com/nl/boeken Only http://www.test.com/nl/boeken is listed in the sitemaps OR Only http://www.test.com/nl/boeken has HREFLANG tags. http://www.test.com/boeken would only have the canonical. That should solve your problem.

Since when Cloud Hosting has become popular, Google downgraded the importance of server location as a factor in International SEO. So if you want to use a server in another country, and the hosting service is good (for all the things told by others here about latency, especially), than you should not have too many problems.

The best way of using multilingual/multi-country in WordPress is using the WPML plugin.

It sounds like you'll want to contact your cart platform regarding that.  That example you sent also uses CDN instead of CAD, so maybe that's part of it.

Hi Guys,Gianluca brings up some good points.Talking about very real situations that happen to me quite often. I will prefer to read German and if there is a conversion like a purchase obviously I will have to back out and find the product that I hope is in stock for the US market.I think placing something the language that is native to the country and you can only hope the visitor. "We saw you are visiting us from the USA. If you want you can go to www.domain.com. If not, do not consider this advice" (this is what Amazon does, for instance). Gianluca User see the English version and can change the language manually? I would say user see native version for whatever country you're actually assuming that they are visiting from. Well said GianlucaAll the best,Thomas

Thanks Michael!

Thanks for the insights. Very helpful. What about the robots.txt, though? Should it stay under http://www.example.com, where crawlers can find the file?

Thanks Monica and Jarno, appreciate you taking the time to give your opinions. Completely agree with what you have said. There are obviously many multinational businesses so I cant see why Google will have an issue with having multiple sites (even pointing at each other) as long as it provides value, firstly to the visitor in terms of trust and also as a trust signal to Google (assisting them provide more reliable results.) In my mind the advantages far out-way the "potential risk". On the flip side doing it to manipulate ranking, purely to pass link juice or replicating and re-purposing content across multiple sites could have a negative impact but I don think that applies in this case. Will do some more research and see whether webmaster support has posts on dealing with multinational brand sites. Thanks again!

You're very welcome. I wish you the best, Don

Sorry for the delay. And thank you for your help.

Hi Dirk i had heard it was possible to geotarget sub domain and sub folders by setting up new profiles for them, but havnt tried to yet but pretty sure its possible In this case its trying to attract 2 different regions/areas via one tld: worldwide english with the domain.com, then Turkey via domain.com/tr. Then there is a domain.com/de subfolder with German content but thats domain mapped to domain.de so is essentially a second TLD to target German language and region. Thanks for sharing that interesting info, i think for the moment at least and as you and others have suggested not to tinker with geotargeting in GWT yet and see how things develop first All Best Dan

thanks Lumina

thanks Ray, the site is lifereader. co.nz and the another good one would be california psychics.  the industry is quiet competitive so not sure they would join the discussion to tell us there tricks, although that would be great lol

With Screaming Frog you would need to crawl, generate, and submit the sitemap (or upload it to your server) whenever it changes (you add/remove a page).

Hi Gianluca, Thanks a lot for your response. Yes I meant to say .ae Our english website is www.tcf-me.com Our arabic website is www.tcf-me.ae (From a SEO point of view, do you suggest we keep the arabic version of the website on the same domain name(.com) or use a shabaka domain name for the arabic version to specifically target GCC Thanks

I appreciate it if people tell me when I am on the wrong path.

There's no easy answer, I'm afraid, and if an answer looks too easy, I'd stay away from it. Building low-quality links might help in the short-term, but it's too high-risk in the long-term. Plus, if you're combining it with duplicate content, you've got multiple quality issues in play (at least, in Google's eyes - I'm not making a judgment calling about using product descriptions, which is very common). You say that unique text is proven to have worked, and yet it isn't an option. Why? If it's a matter of time/cost, I'd strongly consider not only the long-term ROI but the possibility of investing selectively. For example, you don't have to write unique text for every product you sell (or re-sell) - you could pick the top 10% of products (which may account for 90% of sales) and start with those. Even the top 1% would be a start. Small investments in the right places could yield large returns here. The other option that people don't like to hear but really is powerful is to consider more carefully focusing your link equity on a smaller number of products. The more products you list, the more duplicates you have, and some of those products are probably very poor sellers or have very poor profit margins. What if you focused your site architecture on 25% of the total products? You'd focus your authority more and each page would be stronger, relative to your competitors. One easy win is to make sure you're not dealing with any internal duplicate content (product options pages, search filters, etc.). If you're compounding external duplication with internal duplication, it's only going to make all of your problems worse. The internal duplication is much easier to solve.

Backlinks are going to matter much, much more than number of pages. Don't use subdomains; they share almost no domain authority with the parent domain.  AND, you aren't as likely to get a country-specific boost as if you used a country-specific TLD,  Possibly you're just unclear on the difference: if so, here you go: the subdomains are qualifiers to the left of the domain (e.g. www., blog., etc.) and TLDs are the right side of the domain (e.g. .com, .org, .co.uk, etc.). E.g. use www.toaddiaries.ca instead of ca.toaddiaries.com. If the content is really similar across the various countries, i.e. it's just translated, you should use rel=canonical (pointing to the country-specific page) and hreflang alternate (in ALL pages, pointing to all of the other versions of the page).  See Maile's talk on this here. Pay close attention to the distinctions between LANGUAGE and COUNTRY, e.g. spanish versions might exist for dozens of countries, and those differences matter.

Exactly that's what I am worrying