Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for your comments Gianluca. I think Google's guidelines are somewhat ambiguous. Here it does state that "if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately." https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en I think you've explained it nicely though.