International Site Migration

[jayoliverwright]

Hi guys,

In the process of launching internationally ecommerce site (Magento CMS) for two different countries (Australia and US). Then later on expand to other countries like the UK, Canada, etc.

The plan is for each country will have its own sub-folder e.g. www.domain.com/us, www.domain.com.au/au, www.domain.com.au/uk

A lot of the content between these English based countries are the same. E.g. same product descriptions. 
So in order to prevent duplication, from what I’ve read we will need to add Hreflang tags to every single page on the site?

So for:

Australian pages:

United States pages:

Just wanted to make sure this is the correct strategy (will hreflang prevent duplicate content issues?) and anything else i should be considering?

Thankyou, Chris

[DirkC]

Hreflang will certainly help -however it's a bit confusing how you put in in your question. Hreflang is not put on domain but on page level:

Australian pages:

United States pages:

UK pages:

=> hreflang needs to be put on every page (you can test some sample pages here: http://flang.dejanseo.com.au/

Apart from hreflang - register each folder in WMT & target it to the specific country.
So set domain.com/uk/ to specifically target UK.

Apart from that - make sure you adapt the text to the "local" English (so UK english for uk...etc) & use proper currencies & provide local contact detailes. Build local links for each subfolder.

If you do this you should be fine

Dirk

[gfiorelli1]

Apart everything Dirk said in his answer, I suggest you to put the UK version under the .com domain name.

In fact, if you put your UK version under an /uk/ subfolder in .com.au, you won't be able to geo-target the subfolder itself via Google Search Console, because Google will geotarget it automatically toward Australia.

So, your UK version will have very big problems being properly visible in google.co.uk.

If we want to use subfolders for targeting different countries (or languages), it is always better - and somehow an obligation - to use a generic domain name.

p.s.: my comment is caused by what you write here:

The plan is for each country will have its own sub-folder e.g. www.domain.com/us, www.domain.com.au/au, www.domain.com.au/uk

I don't know if that was a mistake or a mixup or it was correct

[jayoliverwright]

Thanks guys,

Yeah Gianluca that was a mistake should be .com/uk thanks for picking it up though!

I was also wondering for the sitemap itself, is it fine to have one single sitemap across all the different countries?

It seems this is what Apple does:http://www.apple.com/sitemap.xml

[DirkC]

One sitemap is ok from technical perspective (as long as it doesn't become to long =>50K URLs). For reporting it is interesting to split per country - this way it's easier in WMT to check if you have indexing problems on a specific country version.

Dirk

PS There is a typo in my initial answer for UK - the language has to be en-uk & not en-us

[gfiorelli1]

No Dirk, the language must be en-GB, UK is not ISO  valid (and that's a classic mistake people do with hreflang).

[DirkC]

Oops - just noticed that I had an error in the first reply and didn't check the correct code. Mea culpa.