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.

What with Google recently coming out and saying they're basically ignoring paginated pages, I'm considering the link structure of our new, sooner to launch ecommerce site (moving from an old site to a new one with identical URL structure less a few 404s).

Currently our new site shows 20 products per page but with this change by Google it means that any products on pages 2, 3 and so on will suffer because google treats it like an entirely separate page as opposed to an extension of the first.

The way I see it I have one option: Show every product in each category on page 1.

I have Lazy Load installed on our new website so it will only load the screen a user can see and as they scroll down it loads more products, but how will google interpret this? Will Google simply see all 50-300 products per category and give the site a bad page load score because it doesn't know the Lazy Load is in place? Or will it know and account for it?

Is there anything I'm missing?

A little bit too advanced I think... well, trial and error it is.

So I am merging two ecommerce brands together and have decided to do so either under a Subdirectory or gTLD.

My aim here is to increase the quality of my SEO for the weaker site (this would be the second italic domain shown in A and B below), thus taking domain authority from the dominant site, while 301 redirecting all pages from the old domain which will hopefully boost the authority and rank for the merged site).

My options for the merged site are:

A. www.website.com & www.website.com/hreflang=en

B. www.website.com & www.website.com/us

Or a combination of A & B (below):

C. www.website.com & www.website.com/us/hreflang=en

Factors:

1. Option A and C results in a longer URL structure for the merged domain which has a negative impact on SEO, while Option B is much more succinct.
2. Both Option A and Option B are the same distance from the root directory, weakening the SEO credibility of the merged domain somewhat. While option C would be further still.

Here are my questions:

1. Option B consolidates Domain Authority, but do Option A and C do the same?
2. Will the first domain receive a boost in Domain Authority and Rank due to 301 redirects targeting the second italic domain?
3. Will any option cause duplicate content issues (some categories/products are identical on both sites)? And if so, how best to avoid them (having Google ignore the subdirectory/gTLD is not an option).
4. One website will target the UK/EU while the other will target the US, will the merged italic site be able to rank well in the US?
5. Are there any other ranking factors I have missed or should consider?

I know this is quite an advanced series of questions, so I would appreciate the opinions of others so I can make the most informed choice.

Thank you

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).

Any follow up?

Any follow up?

Also, if I am using hreflag tags, am I still able to have both sites on different servers with their own localised IPs? This is necessary for SEO.

www.website.com/category-name

Then when you click through to a product:

www.website.com/product-name

I have encountered no problems doing this in Opencart. No 301 redirects were needed because the plugin takes care of this itself.

I want to make sure that you're aware of the different internal structures in URL depth. That's probably why most people would advise you not to go this way.

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean in respect to different internal structures or why the above would be an issue.

Does anyone have experience removing /product/ and /product-category/, etc. from URLs in wordpress? I found this link from Wordpress which explains that this shouldn't be done, but I would like some opinions of those who have tried it please.

https://docs.woocommerce.com/document/removing-product-product-category-or-shop-from-the-urls/

Thank you for the response, Nigel. A few follow up questions:

Using the lang tag in a link, i.e. www.website.com/?lang=en, isn't that a detractor for SEO? I was under the impression that the route to the product should be as short as possible for SEO, i.e. www.website.com/product, as opposed to www.website.com/?lang=en/product. Or will google ignore the ?lang in terms of SEO?

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.