International Targeting: What Does Google Consider an Equivalent Page?

[MetaPaul]

Hi All,

We are working with an international brand that owns several domains across the EU and in North America. Our team is in the process of setting up international targeting using sitemaps to indicate alternate language pages. This is being done to prevent North American pages from being served in the UK, Spain pages from being served in Portugal, or any other combination of possibilities...

Currently we are mapping duplicate or “equivalent” pages and defining them as rel="alternate" on their respective sitemaps. The problem is, it’s not always explicitly clear what Google considers “equivalent.”

1. In this instance, URL structures vary by domain,
2. in most cases the content is similar (but unique),
3. the landing page templates vary is design and functionality,
4. and lastly, services often contain nuances that make them slightly different from one another (Professional Liability Insurance vs Professional Indemnity Insurance).

All things considered, these pages are offering the same service, but are vastly different (see above).

Q: Is it appropriate to use these attributes to serve the correct language / regional URL to searchers?

Q: Is there a rule of thumb on what should be considered an "equivalent" page?

Thanks All,

Paul

[gfiorelli1]

Equivalent means two or more pages that even if are targeting different languages and/or countries serve the same purpose.

The easiest example is the homepage of the same brand that is targeting 3 different countries. One may be in Spanish, one in English and one in Italian; plus they can be in 3 different domain names. Despite of all the differences, they are equivalent.

The same is for services pages or product pages. If product A is sold in the englis website, and Spanish and Italian one, even if their URLs structure is different and their content is different (for instance for the same different language), however they still equivalent.

However, if your site are targeting different countries each one with a different language from the others, you can also consider the idea of not implementing the hreflang, but in those pages where brand name search is prevalent (how me page, contact page).

but, yes, the hreflang is a must if two or more sites are in the same language even if each one of them targets a different country (eg: USA, Canada and UK).

Finally, the fact that the different website you have are not Morris sites, its a plus and ideally what all websites doing international must behave.

[DarinPirkey]

• quick dislaimer:  I've only done international seo for a site that had sub domains and sub folders. Never cross-domains.  So take the recommendation below with that in mind.

Hey Paul,

I generally translate "equivalent" as "this page (X) is the same as page Y but in a different language or intended for a different region".

When you said, "This is being done to prevent North American pages from being served in the UK, Spain pages from being served in Portugal, or any other combination of possibilities..." I wanted to let you know that you might not need to do anything in your sitemap.  I don't know exactly how you set up your domains or translations if any so I use caution with that statement. But, if one of your sites is meant for Portugal, you can set geotargeting in Search Console to accomplish this.  Even if the content is the same on another site but that other site is set to a different country, you shouldn't have a problem with duplicate content.  That geotargeting is basically a signal to Google that you want users in Spain to see the Spain site and people in Portugal to see the Portugal site and these two pages won't be competing.

Where you would want your href lang is on translations of those sites in the perspective countries.  So let's say the Portugal site has an Portuguese, English and French version (the main languages in Portugal) then you would set alternate href lang tags for all the translations on that site.  But if your site dedicated to Spain also has an English version, you wouldn't need to cross reference the Portugal site if you use geotargeting.  (Hope that makes sense)

Alyda Solis, who is an associate here at Moz, has a really cool tool on her site that can help you build the syntax.  https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/