Question on Indexing, Hreflang tag, Canonical

[jrohwer]

Dear All,

Have a question.

We've a client (pharma), who has a prescription medicine approved only in the US, and has only one global site at .com which is accessed by all their target audience all over the world.
For the rest of the US, we can create a replica of the home page (which actually features that drug), minus the existence of the medicine, and set IP filter so that non-US traffic see the duplicate of the home page.

Question is, how best to tackle this semi-duplicate page. Possibly no-index won't do because that will block the site from the non-US geography. Hreflang won't work here possibly, because we are not dealing different languages, we are dealing same language (En) but different Geographies.

Canonical might be the best way to go?

Wanted to have an insight from the experts.

Thanks,
Suparno (for Jeff)

[davebuts]

Hi Jeff,

You can use hreflang to target the same language in different regions.

Google provide a good example of this about halfway down this page: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Like in the example here, you may want to use the US version of the site as the English default and specify regions for the rest.

Cheers,

David

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Jeff,

I agree with what David said. I think the only way to do it you're talking about is with Hreflang ideally you would use that technology to accomplish dealing the same language (En) but different geographies you will need to put pricing everything in the native countries correct format. Great Britain and Canada spell color differently than the United States take that into account as well as it's extremely important.

Take a look at this tool and if you can create the country you wish to specify and keep English as the language which you can and you can create hreflang tags ( I left a good amount of references below to get you started)

• A tool to make the URLs: https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

now keep in mind this is nowhere near perfect but this would be something you could easily do remember English is written differently all over the world and you want to take advantage of that when you write the content for Great Britain or for Canada.

or

Usage: The markup for the part of the HTML document:

• example.com/en-gb: For English-speaking users in the UK

• example.com/en-us: For English-speaking users in the USA

• example.com/en-au: For English-speaking users in Australia

• example.com/: The homepage may, for example, display a list of countries to chose from and is defined as the default page for users worldwide

• http://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag

• https://www.stonetemple.com/the-complete-guide-to-hreflang/

• https://www.sistrix.com/ask-sistrix/onpage-optimisation/how-do-i-correctly-use-the-new-x-default-hreflang-link-attribute-for-international-targets/

• https://moz.com/community/q/can-you-target-the-same-site-with-multiple-regional-hreflang-entries

• https://www.semrush.com/blog/7-common-hreflang-mistakes-and-how-to-fix-them/

Hope that helps,

Tom

[jrohwer]

Hi David and Tom,
Many thanks for all the details and references and combining my reply. And BTW, I'm Suparno, our agency account is in Jeff's name, anyways.

I thought of hreflang tags, but here is the point. We can force EN-US for US site, but how can we tackle the rest of the world. They won't be willing to go for all (major) country specific pages and tags, because So in practical scenario, it will be example.com for the US and and example.com/ex-us for the rest of the world. So, the question is how do we tackle that .../ex-us home page, which will be an almost duplicate of example.com

LMK your thoughts.

suparno

[jrohwer]

Hi David and Tom,
Many thanks for all the details and references and combining my reply. And BTW, I'm Suparno, our agency account is in Jeff's name, anyways.

I thought of hreflang tags, but here is the point. We can force EN-US for US site, but how can we tackle the rest of the world. They won't be willing to go for all (major) country specific pages and tags, because So in practical scenario, it will be example.com for the US and and example.com/ex-us for the rest of the world. So, the question is how do we tackle that .../ex-us home page, which will be an almost duplicate of example.com

LMK your thoughts.

suparno

[BlueprintMarketing]

"So, the question is how do we tackle that .../ex-us home page, which will be an almost duplicate of example.com"

Make the x page /x & tell people that what types of English you have with it.

Then on /en-us/ use the USA based content you have now you can even skip the

hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/

&

Use

I would use

The bottom four to start going after the rest of the world if you add hreflang the page is not thought of a duplicate page.

Try making tags using https://www.sistrix.com/hreflang-guide/hreflang-generator/

Wach this video by Google https://youtu.be/8ce9jv91beQ

This tell's you everything https://www.sistrix.com/hreflang-guide/ about duplicate content & hreflang

Hope this helps,

Tom

[jrohwer]

Thanks Tom, this should be good enough, many thanks.

suparno

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Suparno,

Happy to be of help.

PS.

I know one thing that has made a very big difference for me. If you are going to use one domain to rank all over the world using subfolders. By matching a server near users with a web-based load balancer like (GSLB) global server load balancer you can keep users very happy.

I have seen the best from Fastly & Incapsula

• https://www.fastly.com/products/load-balancing
• or
• https://www.incapsula.com/global-server-load-balancing.html

All the best,

Tom

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[jrohwer]

Hi Tom,

Sorry, one more question, trying to narrow down.
So, we can use:

for the rest of the world page

and

for the US site.

Am I correct?

suparno

[BlueprintMarketing]

Hi Suparno,

Yes you can by using the /x/ page to list Languages that you offer you can utilize it to tell users what language's you offer.  But keep your site the way it is (for the USA) so it would look like this. One lang page & then making "/" the US site/folder.

Does that make sense?

Let me know if you have any other questions.

all the best,

Tom

[BlueprintMarketing]

This is a great checklist

https://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist

http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/international-seo-strategy-guide/

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[jrohwer]

Thanks Tom for all the insights and details.

suparno

[BlueprintMarketing]

Any time always happy to help me let me know if I can be of any service in the future.