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SEOBandits... one thing is what examples Google presents and another the reality. The hreflang annotations can be used in every international or multilingual SEO option: ccTlds; Subdomains; Subfolders Regarding your fear re: Duplicated Content, the hreflang annotations substantially help avoiding this issue, because you are telling Google that those contents may look substantially or entirely identical to it, but they are meant for different users in different geo-location, hence they are not to be considered as duplicates.