Question on canonicals
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hi community
let's say i have to 2 e-commerce sites selling the same English books in different currencies - one of the site serves the UK market ( users can purchase in sterling) while another one European markets ( user can purchase in euro). Sites are identical.
SEO wise, while the "European" site homepage has a good ranking across major search engines in europe, product pages do not rank very well at all. Since site is a .com too it s hard to push it in local search engines.
I would like then to push one of the sites across all search engines,tackling duplicate content etc.Geotargeting would make the rest.
I would like to add canonicals tag pointing at the UK version across all EU site product pages, while leaving the EU homepage rank.
I have 2 doubts though:
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is it ok to have canonical tags pointing at an external site.
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is it ok to have part of a site with canonical tags, while other parts are left ranking?
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Hi there,
While I agree with Logan that hreflang may actually be your best bet, in response to those specific questions:
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Cross-domain canonicals are not inherently problematic.
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By my understanding, at least, you're free to use rel="canonical" whenever you deem appropriate.
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Hi,
It sounds like you should be using hreflang tags. These tags work similar to canonical tags, but help different country-specific versions of Google index content meant for searchers in those geographies. You can read up on the how/why here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag
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