Hreflang/Canonical Inquiry for Website with 29 different languages

[juicyresults]

Hello,

So I have a website (www.example.com) that has 29 subdomains (es.example.com, vi.example.com, it.example.com, etc).

Each subdomain has the exact same content for each page, completely translated in its respective language.

I currently do not have any hreflang/canonical tags set up.

I was recently told that this (below) is the correct way to set these tags up

-For each subdomain (es.example.com/blah-blah for this example), I need to place the hreflang tag pointing to the page the subdomain is on (es.example.com/blah-blah), in addition to every other 28 subdomains that have that page (it.example.com/blah-blah, etc). In addition, I need to place a canonical tag pointing to the main www. version of the website. So I would have 29 hreflang tags, plus a canonical tag.

When I brought this to a friends attention, he said that placing the canonical tag to the main www. version would cause the subdomains to drop out of the SERPs in their respective country search engines, which I obviously wouldn't want to do.

I've tried to read articles about this, but I end up always hitting a wall and further confusing myself. Can anyone help? Thanks!

[RyanPurkey]

If your translations are automated, Google requests that you don't index them, but it sounds like you've created fully translated, static pages. Here's Google's info on that, "Q: Can I use automated translations?
A: Yes, but they must be blocked from indexing with the “noindex” robots meta tag. We consider automated translations to be auto-generated content, so allowing them to be indexed would be a violation of our Webmaster Guidelines."  Maybe this is where someone had confusion... Anyways, here's their larger FAQ on it: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation.  Fully done translations are considered canonical within their own languages, so no need to point to the www version as canonical.

[DirkC]

Hi,

Probably the easiest solution in your case is to use the geo-targeting settings in Google Webmaster tools (but only if each of your subdomains is targeting a specific country - not a specific language).

If you want to use hreflang - there is quite a good post on it on Moz (http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights) - must admit I personally never used it.

rgds,

Dirk

[gfiorelli1]

_For each subdomain (es.example.com/blah-blah for this example), I need to place the hreflang tag pointing to the page the subdomain is on (es.example.com/blah-blah), in addition to every other 28 subdomains that have that page (it.example.com/blah-blah, etc). In addition, I need to place a canonical tag pointing to the main www. version of the website. So I would have 29 hreflang tags, plus a canonical tag. _

Everything correct but the canonical part (but maybe I misunderstood what you wrote).

If the different country targeting pages are in different languages, then you don't have to point the rel="canonical" to the main www. version. NOT AT ALL, because they are not identical. You will start seeing the search snippets of the URLs of those geo-targeted versions (shown because of the hreflang) using the title tag and meta description of the www. version page. So, for instance, the search snippet of the Italian version having the Italian URL but everything else in English. If you need to use the rel="canonical" it should be self-referential (if not another in same cases, but of the same subdomain)