Can hreflang replace canonicalisation ?

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Im working with a site that has ALOT of duplicate content and have recommended developer fix via correct use of Canonicalisation i.e the canonical tag.

However a US version (of this UK site) is about to be developed on a subfolder (domain.com/uk/ & domain.com/US/ etc so also looking into adopting the hreflang attribute on these.

Upon reading up about the hreflang attribute i see that it performs a degree of canonicalisation too.

Does that mean that developing the international versions with hreflang means there's no need to apply canonicalistion tags to deal with the dupe content, since will deal with the original dupe content problems as well as the new country related dupe content, via the hreflang ?

I also understand that hreflang and canonicalisation can conflict/clash on different language versions of international subfolders etc as per:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Igbrm1z_7Hk

In this instance we are only looking at US/UK versions but very likely will want to expand into non english countries too in the future like France for example.

So given both the above points if you are using hreflang is it advisable (or even best) to totally avoid the canonical tag ?

I would be surprised if the answers yes, since whilst makes logical sense given the above (if the above statements are correct), that seems strange given how important and standard best practice canonical usage seems to be these days.

What best ? Use the Hreflang alone, or the Canonical tag alone or both ?

What does everyone else do in similar situation ?

All Best

Dan

[TommyTan]

Hi Dan,

To my understanding on hreflang, since the UK site is only targeting searchers in UK, i don't think you will need the canonical tag and there is no reason to use it.  As the canonical tag is to search engines find the original piece of content and avoid duplicate content.  However, since the hreflang already tells the search engine that the UK page is targeting UK, it wouldn't appear for people that searches in US so duplicate content wouldn't be an issue.

In the end, if you are targeting different countries with the hreflang, i think that is enough.  I would only use canonical if the same content is targeting searchers in the same geo location.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks for commenting Tommy !

The problem is though that the site already has lots & lots of duplicate pages, so want the developers to fix that, and i have been advising they do this via canonical tag since standard practice.

So are you saying that if we use hreflang then no need to use canonical for this existing duplicate content since using hreflang on the new international pages will deal with the old dupe content as well as the new uk/us dupe content too ?

cheers

dan

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Dan

The hreflang will tell google that different pages are targeted to different languages/regions, but it will not help solve your existing dupe content problems as you describe them. So for these you should use the canonical tag.

Hreflang and canonical tags can be used together but can cause issues if you are not careful. Main thing to be sure of is that you keep any canonical tags within the same lang/region pages. You do not want to be having a US page with a canonical tag pointing to a UK page in other words.

Having multiple UK pages with a canonical pointing to the main UK page and the main UK page having an hreflang tag to its US counterpart is ok (as is having a self referencing canonical tag on the main UK and US pages if needed). Google mentions here that this is an acceptable way to handle canonicalisation issues in an international setup.

What you would also want to avoid is having hreflang tags on your dupe content pages in the UK version. Where would they go? to the US version of the duplicate content? To the main canonical version of the US content? That could get messy pretty quickly. So the trick is to consolidate your UK pages with rel canonical and then properly markup your final regional variations with hreflang.

Hope that makes sense!

[TommyTan]

Hi Dan,

Which subdomain do you have a lot of duplicate content?  If you have duplicate content for the EN-US, then I would use canonical tags for the US content.  However, when you create a new sub-domain for UK, I would use hreflang on those contents to avoid causing duplicate content issues with the US contents that are the same.

[Dan-Lawrence]

That great info thanks for clarifying that Lynn !

Im sure ill have some further questions though when going through the process with the developers

Many Thanks

Dan

[Dan-Lawrence]

Thanks Tommy

Its just a .com at the moment but language versions will be on subfolders .com/us and .com/uk with hreflang handling the rest of the internationalisation in conjunction with webmaster tools etc

All the dupe content is on the .com

cheers

dan