Multiregional / Multilingual SEO - What do you do when there is no equivalent page?
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Hello,
We're building out a small number of pages for the US in a sub-folder .com/us. The idea is to show US specific pages to users in that location. However, we also have a number of pages which we will not be creating for the US as they're not relevant.
I am planning on geo-targeting the US folder to instruct the search engines that this subfolder should appear in the US SERPS but since it isn't an exact science, there is a chance that US visitors may land on these non-us pages which could potentially give them a bad user experience.
What should we do in instances where a US user lands on a non-us page with no equivalent page?
Any help would be much appreciated!
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Let them land there (you don't really have a choice in that from search). But if the page really isn't relevant and there is no equivalent, think about popping a message to them telling them that you think they are in the US and that the area for the US users is here and link them there. Also give them a way to contact some sort of help. Either a Help area or an email address.
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You make an equivalent page. What you DON'T DO is try and use a b*stardised mixture of incorrect canonical tags and hreflangs to remedy the issue. You assuredly don't hreflang the page to another page in another language, if it's not the exact same page
Hreflangs have to be mutually agreed to work. If both pages don't cite each other as the alternate hreflang URL, then neither hreflang works (at all). If you hreflang the 'one off' page to another page on the site, then you'd have to change the hreflang of that URL to point back - which would disconnect it from its 'proper' heflang partner(s)
In some situations you just have to give up before you make a bad situation worse (creating messed up hreflang triangles when they are binary only, thus breaking the other hreflangs - causing loads more problems)
If you don't have a strong grounding in international SEO deployment you leave well enough alone!
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First let me say that I'm not an expert on this but I found this article from Google Support that may help.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en
Has a lot of good information. Sorry I couldn't be more help.
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