Ranking well internationally, usage of hreflang, duplicate country content

[DocdataCommerce]

I'm trying to wrap my head around various options when it comes to international SEO, specifically how to rank well in countries that share a language, and the risk of duplicate content in these cases. We have a chance to start from scratch because we're switching to a new e-commerce platform, and we were looking into using hreflang.

Let's assume an example of a .com webshop that targets both Austria and Germany.

One option is to include both language and region in the URL, and mark these as such using hreflang:

webshop.com/de-de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.com/de-at/german-language-content  (with hreflang de-at)

Another option would be to only include the language in the URL, not the region, and let Google figure out the rest:

webshop.com/de/german-language-content (with hreflang de)

Which would be better?

The risk of inserting a country, of course, is that you're introducing duplicate content, especially since for webshops there are usually only minor differences in content (pricing, currency, a word here and there). If hreflang is an effective means to make sure that visitors from each country get the correct URL from the search engines, I don't see any reason not to use this way. But if search engines get it wrong, users will end up in the wrong page and will have to switch country, which could result in conversion loss.

Also, if you only use language in the URL, is it useful at all to use hreflang? Aren't engines perfectly able to recognize language already?

I don't mention ccTLDs here because most of the time we're required to use a .com domain owned by our customer. But if we did, would that be much better? And would it still be useful to use hreflang then?

webshop.de/german-language-content (with hreflang de-de)
webshop.at/german-language-content (with hreflang de-at)

Michel Hendriks
Docdata Commerce

[simon_realbuzz]

From my experience of hreflang it seems that Google still doesn't always display the correct URL in SERPs. In addition we still see duplicates flagged up in Webmaster tools even though hreflang is present on these pages.

We have only ever used hreflang for different English language versions rather than different languages so I can't call upon any personal experience examples to illustrate when using only language variables.

I've found using the SEOMoz SERP Control panel so I can switch between different search engines (e.g Google UK, Google Us, Google Aus) is great for keeping track of how you appear in SERPs in each country you are targetting.

.

[DocdataCommerce]

Hi Simon, Thanks for your response. So you do not think that duplicate content will be a problem when using hreflang? And also, I guess that you feel that Google does not do an awesome job matching languages to countries when using only a language variable on a .com domain? Michel

[simon_realbuzz]

By setting both a country and language in your subfolder you will be able to geo-target each country separately in in your Google webmaster account in order to give Google a clear indication of what language and country you are targeting. This in addition to hreflang should in theory ensure that searchers in each location see the correct version for their country.

In practice I've found that this is not 100% always the case, where occasionally you get the wrong version in SERPs, but generally it is probably the best practice if you are wanting to use a .com domain rather than separate TLDs.