Different urls for the homepage on an international website

[teconsite]

Hi!

I was wondering what would be the best strategy to solve duplicated content generated by the homepage and its differents URLS

This is an international website. Now it only has one language working: Spanish, but the url structure is already ready to work with the language approach

So we have now

www.brand.com -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
www.brand.com/es -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)
www.brand.com/index.php -> Spanish Homepage (canonical www.brand.com/es)

I would like to know if this is the correct approach of if we should add 301 redirects instead of canonical.

Let's image that they want to active the /en language, so they will have

www.brand.com
www.brand.com/index.php 
www.brand.com/es
www.brand.com/en

now what? I image they have to use hreflang, but I am a little lost with how this should work. 301? canonical? hreflang?

Could you help me?

Thank you!

Victoria

[teconsite]

Thank you!!!!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Without seeing the exact scenario, that sounds correct

-Andy

[teconsite]

Hi Andy,

thank you for your answer!
I have checked the post from Aleya Solis, and is really useful.

So, I think that I should avoid 301 redirects in this situation... and use exclusively hreflang and canonicals, right?

Thank you!

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Victoria,

I answered a similar question last week, so have added my last answer below:

========================

There is no problem with international SEO and duplicate content, as long as you follow the rules around this. Start by reading this checklist from MOZ as it will give you a great grounding.

I would also read this article from Google as this will walk you through what you need to do.

HREFLANG will be used to explain to Google about international pages with duplicate content.

I hope this helps.

-Andy