Are my hreflang and canonical link tags set correctly?
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Currently we have a website in english but over time we will roll out parts of the whole site in different languages for different countries which will also result in country specific English versions of the website.
The goal is that Google shows the country specific version of a page in a native language or English if available or falls back to the default English version of the same page otherwise.
I listed below how we plan to use hreflang and canonical link tags to achieve this and was hoping to get some feedback from the Moz community if this will work as expected.
(1) A page (www.mysite.com/page1) exists only in English as default. Users should be able to find it in every country unless there is an English version specifically for this country. We would use the following tags:
(2) A page exists in English (www.mysite.com/id/en/page2) and Bahasa (www.mysite.com/id/id/page2) for a specific country (Indonesia in this case). Users in Indonesia searching in English should find the country specific English page. Indonesians searching in Bahasa should find the Bahasa version of that page. We would use the following tags on the English version:
and therefor the following tags on the Bahasa version:
In this case there wouldn't be a default English version available for the page.
(3) If a page exists in English global, English for Indonesians and Bahasa for Indonesians we would use:
If www.mysite.com/id/en/page3 and www.mysite.com/page3 are very similar we would risk google picking the page they want to rank for an english keyword searched in Indonesia, correct?
(4) If a page in (1) and (2) can be reached with a different URL, we would only use a canonical and don't specify any hreflang tags e.g.:
www.mysite.com/en/other-url-to-page1
or
www.mysite.com/id/en/other-url-to-page2-english-indonesia(5) If a page that exists as global English page becomes available in English for a specific country as e.g. www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 we would use the following tags:
and also add one more hreflang to www.mysite.com/page1:
The assumption here is that Google would rank the localized page instead of the global page after crawling our site again. But since this will be a new page, are we going to lose traffic because www.mysite.com/uk/en/page1 won't rank as well in the beginning (e.g. no offsite optimization)?
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You did not realy ask a question... so no resonses.
But we are 6 months ahead. so you must have tested it!? What did you find? Did it work?
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