International URL paths

[mattdinbrooklyn]

Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages.

My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?

[slatronica]

Hey Matt,

The canonical tags should not be used across different language or country versions.

http://example.com/fr/sample-post -> canonical: http://example.com/fr/sample-post

http://example.com/sample-post -> canonical: http://example.com/sample-post

Each page would have the alternate version hreflang tags setup.

Hope this helps!

Per FAQ: https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-internationalisation#q20

[mattdinbrooklyn]

So my questions is if I have two countries and four languages:

fr.example.com/fr/video and fr.example.com/en/video

uk.example.com/en/video/ and uk.example.com/fr/video/

Then won't uk.example.com/en/video and fr.example.com/en/video have the same content? Should they both canonical themselves or should there be one canonical?

[slatronica]

You don't want to canonicalize to another country version. Keep that rule in mind and generate all the hreflang tags you have for language/locations.

Use this to guide you:
http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

Another great doc outlining using the same language in different regions:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

[gfiorelli1]

Before answering, it is me having a question for you:

why the hell do you need to put spanish content under a french subdomain if you already have it in the spanish version of the website? Is this nothing but complicating everything :-)?

Said that, as Steve said, the hreflang itself solves any potential duplicate issue, so you don't need to cross canonicalized any url. Simply remember to use the correct combo of hreflang ISO codes.

In the case of the spanish version of the french subdomain, the hreflang should reference the fr.sudomain.com/es/... and have as pair these: "es-FR", so to target only the spanish speaking people in France.

This way you are not going to messed up with the same kind of URL in targeting spanish speaking users in Spain ("es-ES") or in Great Britain ("es-GB") and so on.

However, it would have been more logical to have only one spanish URL for the videos, and have their hreflang set up as "es" only, so to target all users speaking spanish in every country.