Canonical Tag Uses Source Title and Meta Data?

[3wh]

When optimising a regional same language micro site within a sub folder of a .com it dawned on me that our use of the hreflang and canonical meta elements will render individual elements such as H1 and title obsolete.

As a canonical tag takes the canonical source title and meta right?

It would still have value in optimising localised headings though?

Appreciate any thoughts, suggestions (o:

[Keszi]

Hi Wvicary,

I think you miss-understood the canonical tag usage.

After applying the canonical to a page you choose which version of the page will be included in the search index.

For example: you have:

• example.com
• example.com/index.html

if in the index file you insert the canonical tag, which points to example.com then example.com/index.html will be excluded from the search results.

now HREFLANG: what id does is creates a connection between same content in different languages. For example you have the domain: www.example.com and have three main languages: EN, NL and DE. and you choose to have three different sub-folders for each:

• www.example.com/en/
• www.example.com/nl/
• www.example.com/de/

inserting in the header the HREFLANG attribute will help the secondary languages gain reputation and not for localization.

Read through John Doherty's article. He tested quite well the HREFLANG.

Here is the article: http://www.johnfdoherty.com/hreflang-markup-testing/

I hope this helped,

Istvan

[3wh]

I understand what both do, but thanks for the clarification.

I am wondering if when using the canonical to group same language micro-sites say English American and UK the heading elements are localised say:

English title / meta contains : "specialist organisation"

English American title  / meta contains: "specialty organization"

Would the cannonical source (the american version) be shown to a UK audience?

Just pondering is all, thanks again Istvan.

[Keszi]

Ok,

let's say example.com/us/ is targeted to US and example.com/uk/ is targeted to UK.

If you put a canonical on both that targets to other one, one of them will disappear from Google Index.

What you can do is use only the HREFLANG attribute. And use that to target en-US and en-GB as languages. Maybe that can boost it a little-bit.

I hope that helped,

Istvan

[3wh]

This is what we have done, as there are multiple languages and multiple countries.

We are going to use HREFLANG and Canonical, but doesn't this combination mean that titles and meta description from the canonical url is used on each of the duplicated regional sites?

[Keszi]

Use only the Hreflang instead of hrefland+canonical combo.

[Dr-Pete]

This is a really complex topic and a special case of the canonical tag.. It also doesn't help that Google keeps adjusting their advice. See this thread:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

"When Google discovers a cluster of pages with a single canonical URL, our algorithms will use the title and snippet from the canonical version in our search results. Therefore, it's a good idea not to include region-specific content in the title and meta description tags of the canonical URL. For example, use "Example Widget Inc" instead of "Example Widget USA Inc" or "Example Widget UK"."

So, what about the non-canonical pages? Well, the implication is that, if you use hreflang AND canonical, you'll avoid dupe content problems but the proper pages may rank in the proper regions, even with the canonical tag. In that case, you'd want to include regional variations in the non-canonical META data (for regional searchers). Unfortunately, I haven't seen good data on this yet.

Like Istvan, my gut reaction is to try hreflang first, without the canonical, IF you're not having duplicate content issues or seeing regional variations cross over into inappropriate regions. If you are seeing that, then you'll probably need both.