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Hi Marty! We checked the post and there are some things that we are definitely going to implement.

Thanks for your help!

We currently have different country versions of our site with a hreflang configuration; we have a spanish site targeted for Spain and then different subdirectories for every latin american country we're targeting to. Other than minimal differences, at the moment they are similar until we can handle providing unique content for each country. Our goal, then, would be to show the right one for every Google version, but also to avoid penalties.

Our configuration is like this:

...

Do you reckon this would be the right approach? Moz is currently telling us that there's duplicate content between the different country subdirectories, and to an extent there is, does that correlate with Google penalizing us for it?

Also I've seen examples of self-referential alternates (such as including the  in the Mexican version), or to put the canonical referencing the primary http://www.example.com/, will any of this help to our goals?

Thanks a lot!

Hi,

What is the best way to target a language that has slight variations in it without actually targetting specific countries?

Scenario:

Ecommerce site that sells mobile phones in Spanish, initially created to target Spanish from Spain. We call a mobile phone a "movil"

Now we want to target LatinAmerican users, which also use Spanish with variations, the most notable being mobile phone called "celular".

We don't want to create specific sites via new ccTLDs, nor subdomains, no directories for each new country, and we want to avoid having two sites - one for spain, one for latinamerica- given that the only major difference is we say MOVIL in spain and CELULAR in LatinAmerica.

What is Googles take if we simply decide to modify THAT specific keyword in each page where it is mentioned?  Either by:

a) Server based. IP Detect. that is, render the page with either one or the other term

b) Javascript based. i.e. Have BOTH terms on all pages but using Javascript show/hide according to user preferences.

c) Display the keywords with different font sizes/emphasis, depending on the visitor.

Any ideas?