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?

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).

Thank you very much for taking the time to respond so eloquently.

If all the products would be visible in the base, non-modified source code (right click page, then click "view source" - is the data there?) then there is a high likelihood that Google will see and crawl it.

I can confirm that each product does in fact appear in the source data, so as you say, Google will crawl it which is somewhat of a relief.

Does this then mean that regardless of which page the products appear on, Google will simply ignore this factor and treat each product the same regardless?

The thing I am trying to avoid is products on page 2, 3 and so on from being valued less.

Hi Kate,

Thanks for the reply.

We have a warehouse in the UK and USA and the products sold on each site vary, so we need to keep them seperate. We want our efforts to be pushed towards SEO best practice, that is to say that the hosting we want regionally and also to merge the brands together (they're currently under two different brand/domain names).

The site we have operating in the US currently isn't doing great and is taking a lot of effort in terms of SEO, effort we could be putting towards the .com. If we bring the US site under the flag of the .com our hope is that it will benefit from the .com's authority and receive a boost (we would also 301 redirect all traffic from the previous domain as not to lose any juice).

I was under the impression that pagination resolved duplicate page title issues with Google, but Moz is flagging them up as duplicates. Is this just a case of Moz not being able to understand pagination or am I missing something?

i.e. correctly formatted pagination: http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/4

Okay, so I have read through the following link in respect to International SEO (https://moz.com/learn/seo/international-seo), and I believe that the way forward it a ccTLD.

My thought was to have .com, .co.uk and .eu.

Currently my site is .com, but receives most of its traffic from UK sources. I'm concerned that when I switch over to ccTLDs, the .co.uk in particular, that my UK traffic could dry up. Switching from .com to .co.uk and then using the .com to target the US market makes sense, but I would like to know others opinions on the potential dangers of doing this.

Also, are ccTLDs kept on the same hosting or would they require individual hosting? The link doesn't cover this question.

Hello Tawny,

The pages in question are correctly canonicalised, so why would it appear on your tools?

As you can see below, both have the correct canonicalised url (referring to their page number) as well as pagination. I can see no reason for them to be flagged up as duplicates?

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/3

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/4

Thank you! Hopefully this resolves my issue