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Multilingual are sites that target languages independently from where they are used.

Multi-country are sites that target specific country and language markets.

So, in your case, if you want to target all Spanish speaking users, you should go multilingual and the hreflang annotation should be:

Moreover, it would be better to change the subfolder URL to http://example.com/es/, because maintaining the es-ar subfolder will make people think that its content specifically targets Argentinian people

Correct answer.

I would only add that implementing the breadcrumb data vocabulary/structured data can help Google understanding the structure of a site, hence facilitate also the "creation" of good sitelinks.

On the other hand, it is plausible thinking that Google will present as sitelink those Urls that tend to be more clicked via search. The sitelinks, in fact, has also the function to help users clicking to the most "popular" Urls for the brand name/homepage search snippet.

We cannot control what sitelink Google will show, but we can demote those Urls Google is showing if we consider they are wrong or not useful.

Finally, your suggestion about geotargeting should not be taken into account if the site is multilingual.

I your specific case - targeting spanish speaking people residing in another country than (in your case) Venezuela - then you should have this kind of hreflang:

<rel="alternate" hreflang="es-FR" href="the content in spanish url"></rel="alternate">

This way you're telling google to show the URL in Spanish to people searching in Spanish but living in France.

Yes, it is an important thing to consider, because Googlers repeatedly told that if the canonicalized page and the canonical are very different, then Google may not take into account the canonicalization.

Question:

Why https://www.locationshawaii.com/jp/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx and https://www.locationshawaii.com/hawaii/hamakua-real-estate.aspx appear to me both in Japanese?

(this happens if first I visited the Japanese version).

Second big mistake: your language switcher in the header is Java... cannot be seen by bots. Change it, because I'm quite confident that the message you're seeing are also because of it. In fact, the hreflang annotations are correctly implemented (saw manually and using flang.dejan.com.au test tool).

Finally... try to avoid Google Translate as a way to translate content on site and, please, localize ALL the content (specifically navigation menu, sidebar links, banners...)

Remember also that you can geo-target subfolders in Google Search Console, creating a specific profile for the subfolder you want to geo-target.

Therefore, in your case, the domain.com/en-ie/ subfolder can be geo-targeted to Ireland.

All the other things suggested by Dan are correct.

Regarding using subfolders or a cCtld, don't think in terms of SEO but of business.

It is true that, if your main domain is very powerful, via internal linking you can give some initial boost to a your new geo-targeted /en-ie/ subfolder, but it is equally true that it is very hard, if not almost impossible, for an internal URL to earn backlinks naturally. In other words, the Irish Time will probably link to your home page (www.domain.com) instead of your "Irish" home page (www.domain.com/en-ie/).

So, if your brand is already know in Ireland or you have the possibility to promote it well from the very beginning, it can be worth starting from zero with a new www.yourbrand.ie domain name.

Finally, if you decide to go for the subfolder way, remember at least to set user browser 302 redirections (but - important - not forcing it every time), so that the users will always land on a /en-ie/ version of your site if they are using en-IE english in their browser (or 302 redirect via IP detection).

Canonicals and hreflangs must be treated separately.

My rule, and this what I said at LearnInbound, from where SEMRush tweeted the tweet you embedded in your post, is this:

1. First set up and/or solve all canonicalization issues your site may have;

2. Once you have solved the canonicalization issues, you can work on implementing the hreflang only on canonical URLs (not canonicalized)

In that case of pagination the pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al have self-referential rel="canonical", so - ideally - the hreflang must reference to the corresponding pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al of the same pagination in the other country and/or language version.

Finally, you are correct regarding the "view all" being the canonical URL of a paginated series.

Here the answers:

1. the hreflang tag doesn't slow down websites performance. it makes have an incidence only in the case you have hundreds of hreflang markups in the html code, so that in t case it is better to use the sitemap.xml implementation.

2. you site is only in English, hence you can't use the hreflang, because it is an "alternate", therefore it always needs a pair (eg: "e-US". using it only in self-referential way (as sometimes we do with rel "canonical" is wrong and Google will present it as a mistake and not consider it

3. if you really want to target only the US public, then you must geotarget the domain in Search Console, going to its "International" section and selecting United States as the country targeted by the site.

You are is wrong and misleadin, sorry.

The he is never redundant and an English site could also be targeting another country than the USA.

You're correct saying it's not useful in this case, but not for the reason you give

The example.com/widget-category/page-3 URL cannot have as href in its hreflang="en-CA" the example.ca/widget-category/page-1 because also this other URL - example.com/widget-category/page-1 - has that Canadian URL as href (moreover, that is the correct href for its hreflang="en-CA").

Hence, if you follow your first idea, you will be having a URL (the canadian first page of the paginated list) that will have two different hreflang annotations ( <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-1" hreflang="en-US">and <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-3" hreflang="en-US">, which is totally uncorrect, because you are telling Google to use two URLs for English speaking users in the USA, instead of one.</rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">

Sincerely I wouldn't worry that much. If you are using the rel="prev"/"next", Google will consider the third page of the US listing as a all with the first two pages, hence it should not start showing it in the index.

The only valid redirection is the one based on user browser, not IP, IMHO.

However, if you want to use that kind of redirection for the home page (not the others pages), then that redirection should be working the first time, so that users can eventually choose to go to another version of the site they prefer (i.e.: I live in Spain and I go to domain.eu. When I travel in the US, I still want to go to domain.eu, not always being pushed to use domain.com).

Moreover, doing that, you will let crawlers to discover also the others version even though they were redirected to the one corresponding to their IP the first time. In other words, Googlebot (Mountain View, USA, IP), the first time will go always to domain.com, but once there it will able to discover also domain.eu and domain.co.uk from the versions selector, and it won't be redirected again to domain.com.

Said all this, the fact is that you want to target a political area (EU) with domain.eu, the world with domain.com and the UK with domain.co.uk.

This desire to target three different kind of geographies complicates everything :-).

The only solution I see is:

1. Domain.com set up as "global" >> hreflang="en". All users using English will see it in the SERPs despite of their location but in these cases (see point 2 and 3);

2. Domain.eu set up as the site for the European countries >> hreflang="en-ES" - hreflang="en-IT" - hreflang="en-DE" and so on.

3. Domain.co.uk set up as the site for Great Britain >> hreflang="en-GB".

Doing this and implementing the hreflang in the canonical URLs of the sites and referencing only canonical URLs of the others sites (apart having the self-referral hreflang), then you should be safe.

However, remember that with those hreflang, people searching in another language than English will never (or almost never) see your sites but for brand name searches or very specific brand + product queries.

Therefore, I am still of the idea that having only English websites for targeting the world means missing a huge business opportunity.

If your girlfriend wants to target Russian living in Russia, then you have to go for a .ru domain name and optimize the website thinking at Yandex as main search engine, even though Google is growing very fast right now in Russia too, especially thanks to Android Smartphones, which obviously have Google as main search engine.

Here you have the Yandex guide for webmasters.

The problem of a .ru domain is that - in Google - it is automatically geo-targeting Russia, so it would be impossible (or very hard) to have a subfolder like www.domain.ru/en/ being able to rank well in Google.com or Google.ca.

For that reason, my suggestions is to create the English version using a generic domain.

Regarding to your question about hosting the .ru domain in Russia or in the US, you could go for a third option:

Hosting in the USA but with a Russian Ip.

Finally, ranking in russian in Yandex is not all that easy as you may imagine

If your .eu domain targets English in all European countries but UK (and you are targeting the USA with the .com), then you should not use the hreflang:

because that annotation says to Google to show the .eu domain to all the people using English independently from where they are, but in the UK ("show domain.co.uk") and USA ("show domain.com"). In other words, you .eu site would be visible to Canadian, Australians or even people in Greenland using English.

If that is also the meaning of the .eu domain, than that's fine, but if it is meant just for European countries, then better not having it.

Moreover, if the .eu is meant as "global", then it is useless to add all the hreflang like "en-it", "en-es" and so on, because the hreflang="en" would be enough.

However, I hope you are considering the .eu in English for targeting countries like Italy, Spain, France, Germany et al as temporary, because - let me tell you - you are not going to see lot of traffic from European not English speaking countries. Why? Because we don't search in English, neither we have our browser set up to use English as main language

That's different, because arabic is not so globally known or spoken, and there's lot of people in UAE speaking only English, so it would make sense having an English version there.

I think that under the main root of the mx. subdomain the main language should be the Spanish one, not English. Hence, mx.flowerpedia.com/rosas/rosas-rojas and mx-flowerpedia.com/en/roses/red-roses

The reason is simple: Spanish is the main language in Mexico, and English is just a language a percentage of the Mexican population knows on a scholar level.

This leads to a fundamental question: are you really sure is there a search market for an English version in Mexico? From my experience, not at all or, at least, not to justify creating an entire English site for the MX. subdomain. Personally, offering an English version in the Mexican subdomain is useless and just causing your site to have a bloated structure, which is going to waste crawl budget and dilute PageRank.

I personally prefer hreflang set up in HTML code, especially because is much easier to verify and correct than when it is implemented in a sitemap file.

I suggest you to dig into the possible issues Dirk is talking about, especially if there are some JavaScript and cookies on the works.

In fact, I have seen several cases where a not perfect JavaScript use may end up screwing things.

i.e.: I go to domain.com - english - and then go to its russian version - domain.ru - from the selector and then go back to domain.com, but now the version I see is the russian in domain.ru because of bad JScript and cookie management.

Depending on the business strategy, you may think to to create specific versions of the site targeting those countries.

This solution, though, apart needing a more sophisticated use of international SEO techniques like the Hreflang mark up, also will need a stronger investment in term of single site's promotion (link building, digital PR, localized content marketing...).

A better solution in the short term can be to use only one "English Global Site", which targets all those countries at once, but trying to earn trust, relevance and visibility also in the "foreign" markets thanks to campaigns targeting also sites/influencers in those countries.

Once you start having a meaningful set of data, so to understand how your site is responding in the several countries you are targeting, and if you see that - for instance - Australia is offering good traffic and conversion metrics, then you can start thinking in creating a specific Australian version of your site.

Both answers above are correct and great ones.

From a strategical point of view, formally blocking russian IPs does not have any SEO effect in your case, because - as a business - you don't even need an SEO strategy for the Russian market.

The answer by Dimitri is wrong! (Sorry Dimitri).

The hreflang's href doesn't pass any link equity (use this definition, not link juice, please :-)).

It is a rel="alternate" and doesn't have any connection with things like 301s.