Question on canonicals

[Mrlocicero]

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:

• is it ok to have canonical tags pointing at an external site.

• is it ok to have part of a site with canonical tags, while other parts are left ranking?

[MattRoney]

Hi there,

While I agree with Logan that hreflang may actually be your best bet, in response to those specific questions:

• Cross-domain canonicals are not inherently problematic.

• By my understanding, at least, you're free to use rel="canonical" whenever you deem appropriate.

[LoganRay]

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