Help with hreflang configuration

[doctorSIM]

We currently have different country versions of our site with a hreflang configuration; we have a spanish site targeted for Spain and then different subdirectories for every latin american country we're targeting to. Other than minimal differences, at the moment they are similar until we can handle providing unique content for each country. Our goal, then, would be to show the right one for every Google version, but also to avoid penalties.

Our configuration is like this:

...

Do you reckon this would be the right approach? Moz is currently telling us that there's duplicate content between the different country subdirectories, and to an extent there is, does that correlate with Google penalizing us for it?

Also I've seen examples of self-referential alternates (such as including the  in the Mexican version), or to put the canonical referencing the primary http://www.example.com/, will any of this help to our goals?

Thanks a lot!

[mosquitohawk]

Good day doctorSIM!

Actually there was a really great post up on Moz last month about this very thing- http://moz.com/blog/hreflang-behaviour-insights

Enjoy!

[doctorSIM]

Hi Marty! We checked the post and there are some things that we are definitely going to implement.

Thanks for your help!