Regional sites built on different platforms - will this solution for international targeting work?

ZachKline

We are working with our dev team on a few upcoming user stories to improve store.hp.com. We came across a question which isn’t clear in the international targeting documentation. Within http://store.hp.com, we have a number of regional stores, but those are often built on separate platforms. Therefore a story developed on the US infrastructure doesn’t carry over to Canada and so forth. The Canada Store is managed by a different team, so that story needs to get scoped, prioritized, etc. independently.

In regards to helping Google understand page equivalence, will Google accept the page relationship if we include hreflang tags exclusively in the sitemap for the US site and exclusively as page-level markup for Canada site? For example:

http://store.hp.com/CanadaStore (hreflang notation at page-level):

http://store.hp.com/us/en" />

http://store.hp.com/CanadaStore" />

http://store.hp.com/us/en" />

http://store.hp.com/us/en (hreflang notation within sitemap file):

<loc>http://store.hp.com/us/en</loc>

rel="alternate"

hreflang="en-ca"

href=" http://store.hp.com/CanadaStore"

/>

rel="alternate"

hreflang="en-us"