- Make example.com the main site. Have a generic, geo-agnostic 'master' version which is the fall-back for markets which don't have a specific experience.
What I had in mind was to make .com the default website. Therefore it would also become the fallback if a country doesn't have a specific website. USA is our main market, but it would have the URL .com/us/en/. Do you think that would be a problem?
- For each other country, build out a /xx-yy/ folder structure for targeting other regions, where xx is the language, and yy is the territory (including the language at this stage means that you don't have to retrofit for it later if you want to translate some content sections).
We're using /yy/xx/ (country/language), divided in folders. Does it impact SEO? Would you recommend use hyphen instead? Agree about the language note.
- Implement hreflang tags which connect equivalent pages across the language/territory splits, and use canonical tags to reference the correct URL for the page the user is on.
In this case, if I'm browsing the home page in the USA (.com/us/en/) the canonical would reference the default home (.com)?
- Use something like Cloudflare or Maxmind to look up a user's IP, and convert that to a country code.
Right now we use this to redirect users on all stores. However, I'm considering keeping the redirect only on the default. If I visit .com form USA I go to the .com/us/en/. If I visit .com/us/en/ from Australia I stay in the USA version, and get a notification asking me if I want to go to the Australian version. Does it make sense?
- If they're requesting a geo-agnostic page from the default dot com site which has an equivalent localised to them (e.g., the product page, in their own language/territory), perform a 302 redirect.
Yes, that's what I'm suggesting: to use a 302 and hreflang to indicate that's the right page for that territory.
- If they're requesting a geo-agnostic page from the default dot com site which does not have an equivalent localised to them (e.g., a product which is not available in their region), trigger a lightbox / modal overlay which lets them know that a localised version of the site is available (but the product they're looking at is not), and ask them if they'd like to view that site instead. You can then cookie their preference, and hide the prompt for future requests.
Excellent idea. I was just discussing with my workmate about the best way to proceed on those cases. We're gonna show all the pages on the geo-agnostic/default site. Users won't be able to purchase from that page though. They can only buy from the countries where we have a presence (and a store), which supports your suggestion.
I have one last question. If I use hreflang properly will Google know that a page is the alternative version for that market. Right now, if I search for a product in Australia it shows me the same page from different stores. E.g.
www.example.com.au/product/name
www.example.com/us/en/product/name
www.example.com/xl/en/product/name (current the global store)
Not sure if we have done anything wrong on the hreflang implementation but it sounds odd.
Thank you very much for your help.
