So my questions is if I have two countries and four languages:

fr.example.com/fr/video and fr.example.com/en/video

uk.example.com/en/video/ and uk.example.com/fr/video/

Then won't uk.example.com/en/video and fr.example.com/en/video have the same content? Should they both canonical themselves or should there be one canonical?

Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages.

My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?

Wanted to ask everyone a questions: So our company is going to be doing a website that is going to be full of videos. The url path will be country.domain.com/language/slug/content-id. We redirect the user when they go to the different country. So if you're in spain on a train to france your URL will change from es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id. Each country can listen to each video in all languages.

My question is with hreflang tags and canonicals. Aside from targeting users in a certain country via Google Search Console, how do I eliminate duplication and tell Google which I'd like to show up via which country. In spain I would like es.domain.com/es/slug/content-id to show in Google and would have hreflang tags on each of the es.domain pages but what about fr.domain.com/es/slug/content-id since it would show the same content? I can't canonical to one of them since I need them to show in their respective country. How do I show the difference in language and country without showing duplication?

I see that they're duplicating their indexing as well. I'm curious if they're getting the same error.

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Thanks Matt, while that post is good in the information my problem with John Mueller's analysis is that it doesn't pertain to news pages that the URL changing as it goes down the page and not in parameters (as in Mueller's example). Is there an example that has the URL change not using parameters? I'm curious about the link= rel="next" code (see below) and if that needs to be added.

Hi,

So my website is having an issue indexing. Much like other sports sites like ESPN or MLB or a variety of others my site changes the URL as you go down the page. So if you go on a news article and continue scrolling you'll go to another news article. I believe that this is creating errors in Search Console with the article being given an error of being "too long". I don't know how to keep this infinite scroll and url changing which increases my pageviews and eliminate the errors. Can someone help?

Thought I'd ask this question to confirm what I already think. I'm curious that if we're publishing something in two language and both are verified by the publishing center if the group would recommend publishing two separate Google News Sitemaps (one in each language) or publishing one in each language.

The most ideal method would be to make the dev page password protected. What I would do is to 301 redirect the dev page to the subsequent correct site pages and then when the SERP refreshes, I'd make the dev site a password protected site.

Also, I read that blog post before but it refers to a 404 not a redirected page. So it doesn't OUTRIGHT say not to do a canonical to a redirected page. It is definitely a loop though and I see the problem in that. I just really wanted an answer to the 301'd page question but I agree that it's not the best idea to do it.

Ah ok that's evidence enough not to do it. Ever want to do something and you know it's wrong but you don't know WHY it's wrong and it's hard to find evidence to show it is? That's where I was at. I wanted to set the homepage canonical to the vanity but I knew it treated it like a 301 redirect. My only impulse to do it was that the vanity URLs were appearing in search. Ok so I won't do that.

The only other question is since Google is putting some of the vanity URLs in search and some of the homepage urls in search, is there any way to keep it consistent? It seems like there isn't since Google is disregarding the canonical (which is all to the current homepage and not the vanity) sometimes in replace of the vanity.

Hi,

So right now my vanity URLs have a lot more links than my regular homepage. They 301 redirect to the homepage but I'm thinking of canonicalizing the homepage, as well as the mobile page, to the vanity URL. Currently some of my sites have a vanity URL in a SERP and some do not. This is my way of nudging google to list them all as vanity but thought I would get everyone's opinion first.

Thanks!

The answer is that it's an old jsp site. So it's a long domain that's not good. So say this, say my company does appliances (they don't but let's pretend) and they own refrigerators.com and dryers.com and blenders.com. They have a bad domain structure and have been doing dryers.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=dry for years. This, of course, isn't as easy to link to. Also, to make things worse, they have 302'd dryers.com. So, after changing the response codes from 302 to 301, some of the SERPs started to include the vanity URL (i.e. dryers.com) but didn't include others (i.e. say blenders.com is still blenders.companyname.com/index.jsp?c_id=ble). I'd like them to have all the same SERP listing and it's ideal for them to be the vanity (wouldn't you rather dryers.com vs that long ugly URL). Also I know this is not the long term fix (someday it'll all be company.com/dryers but that day is not today).

So my question really is: I'm hesitant on putting a canonical on a site that is a vanity though and 301 redirecting but I have no evidence to back this up. Can you help me find the answer with evidence for this?

The most ideal method would be to make the dev page password protected. What I would do is to 301 redirect the dev page to the subsequent correct site pages and then when the SERP refreshes, I'd make the dev site a password protected site.