Is there a Risk Around Creating a Website for Each Country in The World?

[ari_seo]

Is there a risk around creating a website for each country in the world with similar to identical content depending on the language? We need to serve prices and the local currencies and be compliant with regulations. We're planning to use rel=canonical and HREFLANG tags to help with consolidation and GEO-targeting.

[effectdigital]

Unfortunately yes. We have a number of clients who went 'geo-mad' and in almost all situations, it has caused problems for them. Sometimes it has created colossal site footprints which Google doesn't care to index (unless you're a household name, don't expect Google to care about your hundreds of thousands of URLs). Sometimes that has also caused server-load issues for them too, irrespective of Google

Other issues include Google ignoring their canonical tags and setting one language URL as the 'canonical' result (and thus de-indexing the other language URLs). This can happen due to link signals and similar content, stuff like that

Many clients in such a position have **seen their pages devalued as a result of them going against Google's content guidelines **(and simplicity guidelines). If you're not super important, Google don't want to waste 4x, 6x or 20x crawl budget in your site just because you decide to serve in more combinations of language and geo-location. Even with perfect Hreflang deployments, a lot can go wrong if you go nutty so cherry-pick your language/geo combinations and don't be greedy with it

If your brand is powerful online and you have loads of SEO authority / ranking power, then you can deploy hreflangs extensively and usually you can make real gains. Not everyone is in that position, most aren't

Having unique content (not powered by some crappy auto-translate plugin) per deployment is strongly, strongly recommended. By the way if you have less ranking power than most sites which have 'successful' broad-reaching hreflang deployments, you need to adhere to Google's guidelines more strictly than those sites do. You need to make up for you lack of trust and authority, by doing things by the book

Too many people look at big international sites and say: "well Google lets them use relatively thin content so I should be alright too". Nope, you are likely standing upon a platform of radically different stature to those guys, so don't over-reach too quickly or you'll stumble and fall

Also if you are planning to use canonical tags to 'canonical' from one language to another, don't do that. If a page points to another, separate URL with its canonical tag - then it tells Google that it (the active page) is the non-canonical version and usually de-indexes itself

Be very careful how you proceed. If you increase your footprint too far, all the great authority you have built up may bleed out over a sprawling site and you could end up with nothing