Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs?

[danatello]

Hello.

My question is:** Can cross domain canonicals help with international SEO when using ccTLDs and a gTLD - and the gTLD is much more authoritative to begin with? **

I appreciate this is a very nuanced subject so below is a detailed explanation of my current approach, problem, and proposed solutions I am considering testing. Thanks for the taking the time to read this far!

The Current setup

Multiple ccTLD such as mysite.com (US), mysite.fr (FR), mysite.de (DE). Each TLD can have multiple languages - indeed each site has content in English as well as the native language. So mysite.fr (defaults to french) and mysite.fr/en-fr is the same page but in English.

Mysite.com is an older and more established domain with existing organic traffic.

Each language variant of each domain has a sitemap that is individually submitted to Google Search Console and is linked from the of each page. So:

• mysite.fr/a-propos (about us) links to mysite.com/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in French. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc)

• mysite.fr/en-fr/about-us links to mysite.com/en-fr/sitemap.xml that contains URL blocks for every page of the ccTLD that exists in English. Each of these URL blocks contains hreflang info for that content on every ccTLD in every language (en-us, en-fr, de-de, en-de etc). There is more English content on the site as a whole so the English version of the sitemap is always bigger at the moment.

Every page on every site has two lists of links in the footer. The first list is of links to every other ccTLD available so a user can easily switch between the French site and the German site if they should want to. Where possible this links directly to the corresponding piece of content on the alternative ccTLD, where it isn’t possible it just links to the homepage.

The second list of links is essentially just links to the same piece of content in the other languages available on that domain.

Mysite.com has its international targeting in Google Search console set to the US.

The problems

The biggest problem is that we didn’t consider properly how we would need to start from scratch with each new ccTLD so although each domain has a reasonable amount of content they only receive a tiny proportion of the traffic that mysite.com achieves. Presumably this is because of a standing start with regards to domain authority.

The second problem is that, despite hreflang, mysite.com still outranks the other ccTLDs for brand name keywords. I guess this is understandable given the mismatch of DA. This is based on looking at search results via the Google AdWords Ad Preview tool and changing language, location, and domain.

Solutions

So the first solution is probably the most obvious and that is to move all the ccTLDs into a subfolder structure on the mysite.com site structure and 301 all the old ccTLD links. This isn’t really an ideal solution for a number of reasons, so I’m trying to explore some alternative possible routes to explore that might help the situation.

The first thing that came to mind was to use cross-domain canonicals: Essentially this would be creating locale specific subfolders on mysite.com and duplicating the ccTLD sites in there, but using a cross-domain canonical to tell Google to index the ccTLD url instead of the locale-subfolder url. For example:

mysite.com/fr-fr has a canonical of mysite.fr
mysite.com/fr-fr/a-propos has a canonical of mysite.fr/a-propos

Then I would change the links in the mysite.com footer so that they wouldn’t point at the ccTLD URL but at the sub-folder URL so that Google would crawl the content on the stronger domain before indexing the ccTLD domain version of the URL. Is this worth exploring with a test, or am I mad for even considering it?

The alternative that came to my mind was to do essentially the same thing but use a 301 to redirect from mysite.com/fr-fr to mysite.fr.

My question is around whether either of these suggestions might be worth testing, or am I completely barking up the wrong tree and liable to do more harm than good?