International SEO and duplicate content: what should I do when hreflangs are not enough?

[GhillC]

Hi,

A follow up question from another one  I had a couple of months ago:

It has been almost 2 months now that my hreflangs are in place. Google recognises them well and GSC is cleaned (no hreflang errors).

Though I've seen some positive changes, I'm quite far from sorting that duplicate content issue completely and some entire sub-folders remain hidden from the SERP.
I believe it happens for two reasons:

1. Fully mirrored content - as per the link to my previous question above, some parts of the site I'm working on are 100% similar. Quite a "gravity issue" here as there is nothing I can do to fix the site architecture nor to get bespoke content in place.

2. Sub-folders "authority". I'm guessing that Google prefers sub-folders over others due to their legacy traffic/history. Meaning that even with hreflangs in place, the older sub-folder would rank over the right one because Google believes it provides better results to its users.

Two questions from these reasons:
1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong?

2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Instead of trying to fix and "promote" hidden sub-folders, I'm thinking to actually reinforce the results I'm getting from stronger sub-folders.
I.e: if a user based in belgium is Googling something relating to my site, the site.com/fr/ subfolder shows up instead of the site.com/be/fr/ sub-sub-folder.
Or if someone is based in Belgium using Dutch, he would get site.com/nl/ results instead of the site.com/be/nl/ sub-sub-folder.

Therefore, I could canonicalise /be/fr/ to /fr/ and do something similar for that second one.

I'd prefer traffic coming to the right part of the site for tracking and analytic reasons. However, instead of trying to move mountain by changing Google's behaviour (if ever I could do this?), I'm thinking to encourage the current flow (also because it's not completely wrong as it brings traffic to pages featuring the correct language no matter what).

That second question is the main reason why I'm looking out for MoZ's community advice: am I going to damage the site badly by using canonical tags that way?

Thank you so much!
G

[GhillC]

Apologies for the delay coming back to you - Christmas didn't help.

And thanks for your answer; I will give this specific use of canonical a shot starting with small subsets of the site and monitor the impact on my ranking first.

Another interrogation on top of its impact on the site is to know whether it's worth the effort.
But I guess I'll only know it by trying directly.

[katemorris]

1. Is the latter correct? Am I guessing correctly re "sub-folders" authority (if such thing exists) or am I simply wrong?

Your two points are valid ones. I don't want to say correct as in that is the cause for sure, but the age of content in my experience does play a role in duplicate content picking.

2. Can I solve this using canonical tags?
Canonicals can go wrong with hreflang, but it isn't a bad idea if you get it right. However, you know your content and your users better than us.

Another possible solution to help everything is to detect the user's location and ASK (Don't redirect on IP alone) if they prefer to see that location's content. This will encourage the sharing of all of your content over time.

But if I am completely realistic, nothing is going to show up perfectly if you are trying to geo-target without actual geo-targeted content. Sometimes you just need to tell the business owners who made this decision that opening a shop in another country, trying to act like a local business with zero changes to the content, just isn't going to work out in every business in every country.

[GhillC]

Great, thanks for your reply!

How should I use canonical tags though?
I assume that blindly canonicalising parts of the site would be pretty silly.
As in, I've pulled out analytics reviewing the volume of page views for an entire sub-folder against a potential sub-folder it could be canonicalised to.

I.e. site.com/fr/ gets 100k visits
Site.com/be/fr/ gets 1k visits.
Therefore it should be canonicalised as it receives very low traffic (1% of /fr/)

Site.com/de/ gets 100k visits
Site.com/ch/de gets 50k visits
Therefore it should not be canonicalised as it receives a fair bit of traffic (50% of /de/).

Or it doesn't matter and both sub-folders should be canonicalised no matter what?

[jasongmcmahon]

Hi - Pages have authority & this forms part of the domain authority & yes use canonical tags as to avoid being penalised for duplicate content