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Thank you for your help! I thought it was correct, just the Moz team not making it clear that it is a "them" problem, as opposed to a Google problem.

This is what I thought, but the Moz team provided conflicting information because a lot of my URLs are showing as duplicates in MozPro.

This was their response:

After looking into your Campaign, it seems that this issue is happening because of the way some of your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to themselves as canonicals, which basically negates the canonicals themselves. For example, 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/archive' is considered a duplicate of 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/archive' because the canonical tags for each page just points back to itself.

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This means that each page is being considered as the most important page with that content, but the content is so similar that they continue to compete against each other for rankings.

Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical: 
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
If A references A as canonical and B references B, then A and B are considered duplicates

The examples you've provided actually fall into the fifth example I've listed above.

Hello all,

I need to make sure I am doing this correctly; I have one website and with two stores (content is mostly identical) with the following canonical tags;

UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com

USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/

Am I right in thinking that this is incorrect and that only one site should be referencing with the canonical tag?

ie;

UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com

USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/

(please note the removed /us/ from the end of the URL)

Thank you! Hopefully this resolves my issue

I think I understand, this is going to generate a lot of tags - this could be a problem for website speed.

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

I'll see how the above goes, I can always add an English version as you suggest, but I think I have targetted the main languages here and hopefully the x-default will resolve the rest.

Okay, I think I have it down correctly now:

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

How does that look?

Yes, I was just using my home page as an example. Each page references its own URL, as opposed to every page referencing the home page URL - but thank you for pointing that out as it could have been easily overlooked!

This is just getting overly complicated, Google need a more elegant solution.

I will try to add each of the EU countries to the EU site and ROW to the USA site. Is this how it should look?

UK/EU Site:

USA Site:

No, that's not a correct x-default implementation. It should point to the same URL on both sites. Wherever the non-specified locales should go (pick one).

The issue here is that Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. are redirected to the US site, while EU countries are redirected to the UK site. If I select one of the two, then won't all countries listed above be directed to the UK site?

I have now added x-default to both sites, this is how they look:

The Space Collective UK/EU

The Space Collective USA

Does this look correct?

On the EU tags, there's not a "penalty". There's just no "Europe" locale. Since you need to specify valid locales, the only way I know of to scope "Europe" is to include all the locales (or at least the most popular ones. I generally add the primary language for each country, a few languages for countries such as Belgium, and sometime I add en-[country] for all of them if my EU site is in English only.

Also on the EU tags, you should not remove the EU tags and only tag the US site. Tags will all be ignored unless they are reciprocal.

I'm sorry, I don't completely understand what you mean here.

What are your thoughts on simply changing the UK/EU site from "gb-en" to "en"?

I will look at either finding a way to exclude Googlebot from my redirect or offering a popup to customers on which site they prefer to visit. Thank you for the advice here.

Thank you for the response.

My system only allows me to add x-default to the US site, but I can code it into both if need be, is this necessary for both?

If Google penalises you for using GB then perhaps I should just use a generic EN? I think to try and add the other EU lang tags without an actual translate option could cause annoy Google, but if I do, it would look like this, correct?

Or would I write en-DE, en-IT, etc?

As for the redirect, I use an external service to do this automatically, and I thought it was best practice to treat Google exactly the same as you treat a customer?

We operate one company with two websites each serving a different location, one targeting EU customers and the other targeting US customers.

thespacecollective.com (EU customers)

thespacecollective.com/us/ (US customers)

We have always had canonical tags in place, but we added the following hreflang tags two weeks ago (apparently this is best practice);

EU site (thespacecollective.com)

US site (thespacecollective.com/us/)

Literally the same day we added the above hreflang tags our traffic dropped off a cliff (we have lost around 70-80% on the EU site, and after a minor recovery, 50% on the US site). Now, my first instinct is to remove the tags entirely and go back to just using canonical, but if this is truly best practice, that could do more damage than good.

This is the only change that has been made in recent weeks regarding SEO. Is there something obvious that I am missing because it looks correct to me?

All UK and USA website traffic has both dropped by 70% since I made the initial change you suggested.

The georedirect section of the URL is from an external redirect service called geotargetly.com

I believe it has now been done correctly as of a week ago, and yet, my rank continues to plummet - literally plummet.

Is it a coincidence that my rank for both sites just dropped by nearly 40% each after making this change?

That is news to me! Thank you so much for this. I will remove all of the canonical tags and leave only the hreflang, and see how this effects the site rank.

Thank you so much Kate. Just to double check, are you saying that there should be no canonical tag at all on the US site? Or just one (leading to the UK or US site)?

I'm sure not what you mean by "check your crawl logs", can you please elaborate on that? Check them where exactly? I looked in the Google Search Console but there was no reference to IP addresses in any logs.

I tried looking up the linking domains in the Moz Link Explorer for "thespacecollective.com/ ‎us/meteorite-jewellery?utm_source=georedirect‎" but it just says that it isn't a valid domain... so I'm not sure how to check how the URL is being linked to either.

I also noticed on the US site there are two canonical (attached), one for the UK and one for the US. This could be causing problems - I need to find out what is causing this and stop it. On that note, even the US site should still canonical to the UK site, right? Otherwise we would have two sites canonicalising to themselves respectively.

Thank you for your help thus far!

ubaGA4B

Hi Kate,

Thanks for answering. The redirect is deliberate, we do not want our customers to have a choice - if they're in the US or ROW, they go to the US site, if they're in the EU, they go to the UK site - anything else would be detrimental. So long as this doesn't negatively affect SEO, it is the perfect solution for us.

"NASA gifts" is a good example. We were 6th and now relegated to 51+, or "Meteorite Gifts", we were 2nd and not 51+.

"Meteorite Jewelry" took a nosedive too (thespacecollective.com/us/meteorite-jewellery?utm_source=georedirect) and I noticed the URL is picking up the redirect, that can't be good (attached).

VZNs6xa

I have two stores (thespacecollective.com and thespacecollective.com/us) and over the past month the keyword rank for the US store had dropped by half, while the UK store is relatively the same. The content is mostly the same, except the US site uses US spelling. I assumed that this would not be flagged as duplicate content because it is the same site, just serving two locations.

I'd be interested to hear some thoughts on the reason for this drop and how I might fix it.

I use Magento 2 Multistore and have 2 stores set up with identical products, one for the EU and one for the US. The best practice is to allow Google to crawl both sites, but what about the sitemap?

Should I only include one store? The reason I ask is that Google has recently started ignoring canonicalized URLs, so even though the second store is canonicalized, it could affect my rank.

My rank did drop with the last update when this was rolled out, I stopped some canonicalized URLs from generating and my rank went back up (albeit not as high as before).