Canonical for multi store

[moon-boots]

Hello all,

I need to make sure I am doing this correctly; I have one website and with two stores (content is mostly identical) with the following canonical tags;

UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com

USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/

Am I right in thinking that this is incorrect and that only one site should be referencing with the canonical tag?

ie;

UK/EU Store: thespacecollective.com

USA/ROW Store: thespacecollective.com/us/

(please note the removed /us/ from the end of the URL)

[moon-boots]

Thank you for your help! I thought it was correct, just the Moz team not making it clear that it is a "them" problem, as opposed to a Google problem.

[seoelevated]

This is because Moz hasn't updated their crawling tool to consider hreflang in the equation of reporting "duplicates". They've acknowledged that. They might update it in the future. But for now, you just have to ignore pages being reported  as duplicate if you know that they are properly linked by hreflang to distinguish countries or languages.

Self-referencing canonical tags are a best practice, and will give an important correct signal to the search engines, which is more important than cleaning up reported warnings in the Moz crawl.

[moon-boots]

This is what I thought, but the Moz team provided conflicting information because a lot of my URLs are showing as duplicates in MozPro.

This was their response:

After looking into your Campaign, it seems that this issue is happening because of the way some of your canonical tags are pointing. These pages are considered duplicates because their canonical tags point to themselves as canonicals, which basically negates the canonicals themselves. For example, 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/archive' is considered a duplicate of 'https://www.thespacecollective.com/us/archive' because the canonical tags for each page just points back to itself.

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This means that each page is being considered as the most important page with that content, but the content is so similar that they continue to compete against each other for rankings.

Here is how our system interprets duplicate content vs. rel canonical: 
Assuming A, B, C, and D are all duplicates,
If A references B as the canonical, then they are not considered duplicates
If A and B both reference C as canonical, A and B are not considered duplicates of each other
If A references C as a canonical, A and B are considered duplicated
If A references C as canonical, B references D, then A and B are considered duplicates
If A references A as canonical and B references B, then A and B are considered duplicates

The examples you've provided actually fall into the fifth example I've listed above.

[seoelevated]

You should stick with two different canonicals. Self-referencing in each case. And use hreflang tags to link the country-specific variations together.

Pointing both pages to one single canonical is telling the search engine to only index one of those pages.

The self-referencing canonical in this case is simply to deal with variations of the base URL, like in case it has query strings, or http vs. https, or www vs not, etc.

Where you would want to point two different pages to one canonical is when you only want one of those pages to be indexed. If the content is duplicate, the search engine would likely make that choice for you. So, including a canonical lets you give a directive to the search engine, instead of deferring to it on the choice of which.