Migrating to a tag-driven global website - Need opinions!

[marshdigitalmarketing]

We currently have a global site that is set up this way:

• Subfolders to designate countries.
• Content in same language is re-published on other country websites.

Since we are re-launching at the end of the year, we are doing away with re-publishing content on different country sites and will just maintain a single copy of our content (to be populated on different pages using content tags). We are planning on doing this so that there is no need to apply href-lang tags on our content.

My questions:

1. Is maintaining just a single instance of an article good for a global website?
2. What are the possible complications that may come up from this approach?
3. Since there is only one version of the article that is being indexed, is a rel-canonical tag even needed?
4. Should href-lang tag still be applied to high level pages (homepage, etc) to ensure that the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography?

This question is quite long,  so any feedback will be helpful. Thanks!

[katemorris]

Hi!

I have similar questions. It sounds like you are posting articles in the main language it was written in and not doing any geo-targeting. Is that right? I'm not sure because you mention "the correct homepage shows up in the appropriate geography."

If an article is written in Portuguese, you aren't translating it?

Let us know some more details and we are happy to help!

[ClaytonJ]

Hi

Am a little unclear on your query but it seems you are moving to a single page - per article platform and trying to rank internationally.   So for one unique page you wish or expect that same page to rank for example in the USA as well as Ukraine..  is that correct?  Assume if they find the page from Ukraine they use google translate... etc.

To be clear is that what you are asking?

If that is the case it will not work.  Effect digital sums it up pretty well.  T

Regards

[effectdigital]

If you are talking about having a single URL which generates differently translated content based upon where the user is from, it's a terrible idea and god-awful for SEO. Have seen so many sites with single-URL multi-content builds perform erratically and terribly. Usually the 'quick and easy way' to 'get out of doing proper SEO' is the path to absolute ruin

Google only crawls from one data centre at once, so if they crawl from Spain and see the Spanish content, they will assume that's all there is there and you have just changed it. So your rankings will fly around like a pinwheel and never really amount to anything

Hreflangs and site build out is the best way, anything quick and dirty is usually destined to kill your multi-regional rankings (dead)