That notification seems confirming my supposition that Google is consolidating that homepage with some other of the existing ones... hence, I'd test the canonical hack I explained above.
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Posts made by gfiorelli1
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RE: International SEO Setuo
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RE: Google indexes page elements
Hi!
I see that the website you link to in your question is a WordPress.
So, my question: do you have Yoast SEO installed?
If the answer is yes, then you should be aware that since April 2018 Yoast SEO changed how the default set up of the media attachment URLs of WordPress are treated by the plugin.
Since then, you must explicitly tell the plugin to not let those URLs (created by WordPress, not Yoast, to be clear) indexed.
Many other websites using Yoast are suffering this kind of issue (this is the bad of not reading the plugin updates' specifications), so that Yoast itself published this post few days ago https://yoast.com/media-attachment-urls/, which explain how to correctly set up the plugin and what to do to purge the Index of your media attachment URLs (aka deindexing them).
I hope this will help you out.
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RE: "Noindex, follow" for thin pages?
EGOL was right asking more information also for one precise reason: in some website a "thin page" maybe the best thing the same website can offer to a visitor because that page answers exactly to what the user needs from it.
That is why so often the Googlers say that thin content per se it's not a problem.
It's a problem if it is due to some technical issue or because of bad on-page SEO (i.e.: a page with a photo and no caption and written description of the photo).
So, to better answer your question, we need to know more about the nature of those thin pages you are talking about.
p.d.: using "noindex, follow" is not anymore suggested by Googlers. In fact, few months ago, John Mueller declared that if Google sees a page with a noindex,follow for a long time, then it will start considering the "follow" as a nofollow", so the original reason of its use won't be satisfied.
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RE: Difference keyword tool and related topics
Enriching your keyword thesaurus with the words Google bolds in the SERP for your main keyword is correct.
In fact, they are synonyms or what Google as "synonyms" of your keywords or "query".
I do the same, and it works... albeit it's a very manual procedure, so I wouldn't recommend it as a general task you do for every keyword you are targeting.
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RE: International Websites - Hosting, Domain Names, & Configuration
Apple is doing what is doing because it decided to go the subfolders way for their main website, but they obviously own also the ccTlds for brand protection and redirect them.
Once, though, it was using subdomains for its ecommerce part (now they are subfolders under each country section.
Actually, it is not correct to say that one solution (subfolders, ccTld or subdomains) is better than another. It all depends on the specific business needs and, secondly, on technological needs.
However, it is true that when a company is starting an internationalization of its business, a better option is going with subfolders, so to give them some strength via internal linking, while not forgetting to improve the popularity and authority of the country targeting subfolders with localized link building and digital PR campaigns.
On a middle/long term, though, and traffic and conversion metrics justify it, it may be better to move the subfolder to a unique domain name geotargeted to the marketed country. The reason of this choice can also be found out of the SEO world (i.e.: in the UK the marketing strategy is different than in the USA because of nuances of the same UK market or different seasonality).
Regarding hosting... having a site hosted in the country the site itself is targeting is not anymore a ranking factor in International SEO since when cloud hosting became mainstream.
However, it still remains a (tiny) geotargeting signal for Google, as they repeated sometimes on Twitter and Google Hangouts.
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RE: International Websites - Hosting, Domain Names, & Configuration
In the case of markets where Google is not the main search engine, but others like Baidu in China, Naver in Korea, Yahoo in Japan and Yandex in Russian speaking countries, then I would strongly suggest to go for ccTlds, because those search engines do not work the same way Google does (hence, SEO it's different. A good example of this is Naver).
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RE: Website relaunched: Both old pages and new pages indexed
Hi vtmoz!
Did the issue you described here still present?
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RE: Hreflang tags and canonical tags - might be causing indexing and duplicate content issues
Hi... I'm sorry to tell you that the answer offered by Gaston is not totally correct.
So, in your Spanish page you have these hreflang and canonical annotations:
This is not correct because you are not adding also the self-referential hreflang annotation
Google is very precise about this, and it states its need in the help pages as well in many Googlers tweets and webmaster office hangouts.
The rel="canonical" is correct. Remember that the self-referential and the alternative href URLs must always be canonicals.
Finally, regarding the subfolders blocked via robots.txt, yes! that's totally incorrect:
if you're blocking Googlebot from accessing the Spanish, French and Italian subfolders, then Googlebot won't be able to parse the code of their pages, hence it won't be able to see also the hreflang annotations... with obvious erroneous consequences.
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RE: Help! Choosing a domain for a European sub-brand when working as a partner in North America
Your question is quite convoluted, so I hope to answer it correctly :-).
My first thought when reading your question was: "Why do they want to associate two so different set of products?".
I mean, I fully understand that you are moved by SEO consideration, but - honestly - SEO should not enslave business considerations and logic.
Widget and Gears are two totally different kinds of products and, especially, they have very different kind of buyer personas. In other words: the buyer personas targeted by the widgets website not necessarily are interested in gears.
Plus, also on an entity level, there's no connection between widgets and gears, hence also for Google would be hard to start understanding for what entity set is relevant the website if it is not presenting itself as a broader ecommerce store.
So, strategically, I would not start with SEO (bear with me...) as the main channel for the new gear website, but on branding, creating a dedicated website in a dedicated unique domain name.
Hence, I'd create campaigns to support the launching of the new website and line of products, so to create a solid backlink profile from the start, which will obviously help in rankings.
Said that, I would take advantage of the visibility of the Widget website for announcing the new Gear one (I suppose the widget site has a news section and an About Us section, under which you can create a landing page explaining what other "companies/websites" are part of the "Businesses company owning the Widget website".
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RE: International SEO Setuo
First of all, the answer given by Kate is totally correct, so consider it.
However, I will try to answer your question from a different perspective and starting from considering that there's a serious reason why your client needs to have different websites for targeting different countries where the same language is spoken (i.e.: some products are not available in every geography, or the client is marketing the services/products with different messages or, simply, the business company has also a physical presence in the targeted countries).
So, considering that starting point, we can find ourselves in 2 situations.
The first is the ideal one: the websites - albeit substantially identical in their purposes - are localized (different content or simply a different "writing" of the content from site to site, attention to the country level nuances of the language (i.e.: respecting British English orthography in the UK website).
In this case - apart geotargeting the domain (if its a generic domain name) via GSC or relying on the automatic geo-targeting the country code domain names have and earning "local" backlinks - you should implement the hreflang annotation in order to indicate to Google what URL to show to searchers depending on their language and location.
The 2nd case is more tricky and, unfortunately, more common: the websites targeting different countries but having the same identical content from site to site.
In this case, you should still need to implement the hreflang but, contrary to all written and available documentation, you should canonicalize all the duplicated website to the "canonical" one while indicating in the href element of the hreflang the canonicalized alternative URLs.
As I said, this is not "documented" in any Google help pages because it's formally the wrong way to implement the hreflang. In fact, we all know that that alternative and self-referential hrefs must always be "canonical" URLs.
However, this is a strong and valid exception, and it has been validated as such by John Mueller in a tweet answering a question by Glenn Gabe about this same situation.
Said all this, when it comes to hreflang implementation in this kind of situation, I always suggest running a test on a limited set of URLs before implementing it broadly.
Finally, you're asking if you can do it this on WordPress. Sure you can.
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RE: International Targeting: What Does Google Consider an Equivalent Page?
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.
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RE: Do you use HREF lang tags when each page that is localised only exists in that language?
Your question is not very clear, sincerely.
if the product pages that marketing only the USA users iare the only ones existing of those products (aka: there aren’t Uk product pages for those same products), then you must not implement the hreflang.
The hreflang is a rel=“alternate”, which means that it must always show an alternative URL to the current one. In the ISA product page it should signal as alternative UK users the UK ones, and viceversa.
so, if no UK product page exists, then the hreflang does not have an meaning to exist.
regarding your second question, if the USA market is very important for you and you want to market it differently thean you are marketing the UK one, then it may be a good idea to create an USa version of your site.
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RE: Do you use HREF lang tags when each page that is localised only exists in that language?
Despite the efforts, this answer do not respond to the question
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RE: Google: What factors contribute to rank a landing page in a specific country?
Localization of the content of the landing page (from IRL to title tag and meta description to text in the page itself.
Geotargeting the landing page: if it is in a separate subfolders and the domain is a generic domain name, then you can eventually create a Google Search Console for that folder and geotargeting to the intended country in the International Targeting Page of the prope itself.
An alternative to subfolser is having the landing page you want to geotarget in a subdomain and then geotargeting it as I describe above.
If you want to create a landing page in a separate domain, then it would be better a country code domain name like, for instance, .es for Spain.
if the landing page exists in different country versions, then it would opportune to implement the hr so to indicate to Google What landing page to show in the SERPS depending from where the searchers is searching from.
Finally, links from site targeting the country the landing page is targeting too.
having a hosting in the targeted country is not anymore and international seo ranking factor.
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RE: When should hreflang be deployed in this situation; now or later ?
Hola!
The hreflang is not something based on authority or popularity: it is a “swapper”.
i use that term consciously because “swapping URLs“ is how John Mueller define what the hreflang does.
When Google sees that we are indicating that a URL is the correct one for a given geography, and in that geography is already ranking another URL, then Google will swap the two URLs and start showing the new one.
This means that Google should start showing the .co.uk URLs instead of the .com mes.
However, I suggest you to test this on a limited set of URLs and see the results. If the swap happens, then you can proceed extending the hreflang to all both websites.
Finally, surely it is fundamental to optimize the .co.uk websites, at least starting with basic on page and tech seo action and then, hopefully, with improving their link profiles.
in fact, even if the swapping works, you then must maintain the rankings.
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RE: We have a site with a lot of international traffic, can we split the site some way?
If I understood well, your .com website has good traffic from the USA, albeit you’re targeting the UK as a market.
the solution I see it to create a mirror website under .com/is/ and geotarget that subfolder to United States in Google Search Console, while geotargeting the domain to UKz
Then, I’d implement the hreflang tags so to indicate to Google that it must show the UK URLs to people searching from UK (hreflang=“en-Gb”) anddto show the US ones to USA searchers.
However, being the 2 versions identical, I’d canonicalize the USA versions n toward the UK one. Be aware that this is not how Google suggests to implement the hreflang, but John Mueller himself confirmed to Glenn Gabe that this is the correct thing to do for avoiding Google to consolidate the duplicated content using a version which is not the one you prefer.
fianlly, if you still want to target also English speaking users not from UK or USA (I.e.: Canadians), you could add a third hreflang annotation like this: hreflang=“en“.
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RE: An International SEO Conundrum
I would do exactly the same... but I would do more: if a page in the /ru/ subfolder is not translated to Russian, then I would see if it's possible to not even create a clone that I must, then, canonicalize.
I see "I would see" because I don't the website, hence I don't know if there's a business reason behind this useless duplication.
Said that, my suggestion is the best one, sincerely, also for avoiding crawl budget waste (rel="canonical" doesn't prevent a page from being crawled).
Regarding you worry, you should not worry about it because this is a plausible case for using the rel="canonical".
However, if you're fearing it, you have also this option: implementing the hreflang and setting it up to "en-ru" for the English pages targeting Russia and simply "en" in the ones targeting the English speaking users in the rest of the world.
In that case, you should avoid the cross geo-targeted pages canonical, and implement the rel="canonical" as if you were working on two separate websites.
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RE: One company, 3 countries, 3 sites - best solution?
Gaston, your answer is correct (albeit not complete... see my answer below).
Plus: when linking to posts and guides, even if they are by Moz, always explain why they can be useful.
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RE: One company, 3 countries, 3 sites - best solution?
The answer offered by Gaston is correct, but it's not the only option available.
You can consolidate the three websites under the .com one and geo-target the /fr/ and /de/ subfolder via Google Search Console.
However, I wouldn't install 3 different WordPress, but only one and use the WPML plugin (https://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/), which works with no issues with all major WordPress plugins usually used for SEO (like Yoast SEO).
I don't pitfalls in a consolidation, but every international strategy really is unique and, not knowing the details of yours I cannot give you a firm positive (or negative) answer.
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RE: Hreflang made simple
Believe none blindly :-), however, trust more people who do International SEO since ages like me or Aleyda or David Sottimano.
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RE: Which Google does a .ie website get shown in?
I see a lot of confusion in all the answers :-).
The .ie domain is never treated as a generic domain name by Google. It's the country code domain for Ireland. Stop.
A country code domain name is geo-targeted by default on its corresponding regional version of Google, but Google doesn't "block" its visibility also in others Google (i.e.: Google.com or Google.co.uk), however, a ccTLD will have more difficulties in ranking higher in another Google than its own.
In other words:
- domain.ie is targeting by default Google.ie;
- but, it can be shown in Google.co.uk too;
- however, for ranking in Google.co.uk - because of its geo-targeted nature - it must have stronger signals like mentions and backlinks to justify its visibility than a domain.co.uk or domain.com.
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RE: Hreflang made simple
That post on SEOChat, albeit correct in the basics, is frankly old (it still suggests to use Dmoz, which doesn't exist since at least 1 year).
I suggest you view this slide deck by Aleyda Solís: https://es.slideshare.net/aleydasolis/speaking-in-tongues-establishing-a-successful-international-web-presence-smxeast.
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RE: Hreflang made simple
Ehmm... sorry to say that you're totally wrong... having 3 sites using the same language and using the same exact content, even if you geo-target them, they still are the best example of exact match duplicate content... and only implementing the hreflang you can avoid to see them filtered or 1 appearing in the wrong SERPs.
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RE: Hreflag Tags - English language & multiple regions
First of all, you must ask your client if she target different regions like continents for some reason related to her business.
If not, then going multilingual is the best solution that trying to geotarget countries... also because, as Gaston wrote already, you cannot geotarget anything but nations: no continents, no political or economic states unions (like the UE).
If there's some justified business reason why the client needs to specify different versions for different large areas, then things can be weird, but there's a way to do it: using as many hreflang annotations as they are the countries present in a bigger geo area and targeted by a specific website.
Remember, in fact, that an URL can be annotated with as many hreflang annotations as needed.
i.e.: the www.domain.com targets Italy, UK and France with its English version but not other states for whatever reason (so not able to use simply hreflang="en") and Spain with the Spanish one, then its hreflang will be:
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/" hreflang="es-ES"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-GB"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-IT"></rel="alternate">
<rel="alternate" href="https://www.domain.com/en/" hreflang="en-FR"></rel="alternate">
(I know it would be better to create an Italian and French version too, but this was just an example to give you an idea of what I was saying).
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RE: Are my language tags correct?
Both the hreflang looks correct if your site is targeting only :
- Spanish speaking users in Spain (hreflang="es-ES")
- English speaking users in Spain (hreflang="en-ES"
If you are targeting English speaking users no matter the country, then you should use the hreflang="en" and not "en-ES".
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RE: Are my language tags correct?
You can create an hreflang with codes "en-es", because "es" also is the iso code of Spain as country, so the hreflang "en-es" is English in Spain (albeit would be better writing en-ES, but Google is not caps sensitive from what I know).
Second... you don't need to use the hreflang in every page, only in the ones that really need it.
For instance, if a page is canonicalized to another, the best way to avoid potential hreflang implementation mistakes (for instance, for not using the canonical URLs in the hreflang annotations) is not implementing it at all... because for its same canonicalized nature.
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RE: Incorrect Spelling Indexed In Meta Info - Can't Change It
Hi John,
could you please give us a feedback and tell if any of the suggestions the community offered to you was of help?
Thank you.
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RE: Schema for languages Subfolders
I suspect you didn't understood the question.
MTBE was asking if schema.org structured data items must be in the language used in the subfolder.
For instance, in www.domain.com/en/, will be the items written in English and in www.domain.com/es/ in Spanish?
The answer is yes.
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RE: HTTPS and server questions
Albeit your answer is correct, Google itself states in its guidelines page about Multilingual and Multiregional websites that - due to the diffusion and mainstream use of cloud hosting - that the physical localization of a server is not anymore considered as a prominent geotargeting factor.
Therefore, I would consider having a server in a hosting located in the same country we are targeting, if the latency really may mean the difference between a slow and a fast website.
If it doesn't... I would not worry about its location.
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RE: Ranking in .com .fr .de but not in my target .cz serp?
Did you try to add a third hreflang annotation like this?
You can assign more than 1 hreflang annotation to an Url.
Maybe you could test this idea for a subfolder that you can easily track on Search Console.
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RE: Ranking in .com .fr .de but not in my target .cz serp?
Mmm... now I understand your question, and - yes - that sounds weird.
Sincerely, without knowing the site and for what keywords it doesn't rank with its English version in CZ for English queries, I cannot give an answer.
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RE: Ranking in .com .fr .de but not in my target .cz serp?
If the sites are in two different languages, then canonicalizing the CZ version to the EN version is not only a mistake: it's stupid because you're telling Google: "Hey, this is the Czech version of the site, but I don't care... so show the English version to Czech people".
Even if the two sites have the same language but target different markets, it would be wrong cross-canonicalize one of them.
The use of the hreflang is a win-win also for this reason: avoiding duplicate content issues... so, if you cross-canonicalized the two sites, quit that canonicalization ASAP!!!
Then, regarding how the hreflang has been implemented by you, that is ok... albeit no positive response can be given in a Q&A without seeing the actual code.
Finally, regarding why your CZ subdomain is not ranking in google.cz as the English version does elsewhere... the answer is easy (at least in theory, as - I repeat - no real answer can be given without knowing the website): your cz subdomain is a separate website and probably doesn't have a strong link profile, at least not as strong as its competitors.
And, no: even if your english website has a strong link profile, it is not helping at all the cz subdomain.
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RE: Href Lang Errors
I see that that product has two Urls:
- http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/single-leg-wire-rope-slings
- http://www.key.co.uk/en/key/0-4-tonne-wll-6mm-single-leg-wire-rope-sling-580a078n
The first one is the Url you indicate as canonical and the second one is the one that you canonicalized toward the first and where the mistake is flagged. I suppose the same happens in the .ie version.
Formally, I don't see any mistake in how the hreflang has been implemented in the 2nd url, because if you really mean to have it canonicalized toward the 1st, then is totally correct to use the canonical url in the self-referential url and the en-ie hreflang annotations.
I checked the Urls with Screaming Frog, setting it to crawl the hreflang's urls, and it doesn't show any error... so, if that kind of mistake is presented only by the SEMRush Audit... then that's a mistake of the SEMRush audit.
However, does this mistake appear in your Google Search Console?
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RE: Should I implement Structure Data Markup before implementing AMP?
Remember that you can implement Structured Data in AMP too.
Moreover, in some cases (i.e.: the recipe markup), Google obliges you to implement it on AMP if you want the Recipe rich result on mobile.
The same for the item list rich card, which may give you a wonderful rich result where all the items of a category page of yours are shown in a carousel in the SERPS.
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RE: Most useful things to do without developer resources on SEO
Beware with LSI, which is mostly a myth.
As Bill Slawski wrote in Inbound.org back in 2014:
_Latent Semantic indexing was invented and patented in 1990 before there was the web. _
_It was developed to help index small (less than 10,000 documents) databases of documents that didn't change much (like the Web does). _
_There have been a number of companies that started selling LSI Keyword generation tools that promised that they could help identify synonyms and words with the same or similar meaning. _
Where those fail is that the LSI process requires access to the database (of documents) in question to calculate which words are synonyms - and the only people with access to Google's database to do that kind of analysis (which isn't possible anyway since Google's index is much too big and changes much too frequently) is Google.
A much better metric is TF-IDF, albeit always being conscient that it is still a metric... not the bibie.
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RE: Most useful things to do without developer resources on SEO
Keyword Density is a myth as it has been demonstrated for several years !!! Please, don't spread myth in the Moz Q&A.
Some sources:
- https://moz.com/ugc/seo-myths-that-persist-keyword-density;
- https://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday
- http://www.alessiomadeyski.com/seo-myth-keyword-density/
- https://plus.google.com/+BillSlawski/posts/F9h4pVSXapT
- https://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/how-search-really-works-the-keyword-density-myth.html
- http://resources.spyfu.com/4-seo-keyword-myths-you-shouldnt-buy-into/
- https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/seo-myth-busting-01-keyword-density.961827/ (I mean, even black hats say it's a myth!)
- ....
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RE: Most useful things to do without developer resources on SEO
This answer is good, because of the tools that are shared.
However... creating unique content doesn't mean your site will start earning links like crazy.
Umberto Eco once said that there are thousands of exceptional books that nobody ever read. The same can be told about all the "great content" published on the Internet. If you don't
If you don't put the same effort you put in creating your "quality content" into promoting it, then you're not going to obtain any backlink at all.
Therefore, more than thinking about what tool to use for creating content (please, don't confuse content with formats), I think it's better to suggest checking out the posts here on Moz under the Link Building category.
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RE: Most useful things to do without developer resources on SEO
Social signals are not a ranking factor.
Moreover, it has been demonstrated by Buzzsumo that the theory of social media amplification = more backlinks is false, because, as that study says:
- only a small percentage of all the blog posts published daily are able to obtain a minimum number of social share and
- in order to obtain at least one backlink, thousands of social shares are needed.
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RE: What's the Best Strategy for Multiregional Targeting for Single Language?
The correct answer is
- Quit geo-targeting in GSC
- Implement hreflang annotations. Their same implementation will avoid the risk of Google considering the "duplicate" versions as duplicate
- DON'T CANONICALIZE ALL THE VERSION TO ONE YOU CONSIDER CANONICAL. Doing that will screw all the hreflang implementation and the other countries will always see the canonical Url (for instance the US one in the UK).
- Instead, work on canonicalization but version by version as if they were (and actually they are) different websites. This means self-canonicalization and/or canonicalization toward another url in case, you know, of parameters et al
- Try the most you can to localize the different versions of English you're using. This will improve the localization signals for Google (and will be appreciated by your users). However, if you cannot afford to do that, you're still safe because of the hreflang.
- Remember that the href of the hreflang annotations must always present a canonical Url. So, if you implement the hreflang in a canonicalized Url, its href will need to present the canonical url of the canonicalized page the hreflang is being implemented. If you don't do this, you will see "no-return" error in Search Console, and Google won't consider your hreflang implementation and, yes, it will start considering your versions duplicated content.
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RE: Issues with the apperance of cross country sitelinks
Hi!
Sorry to see only now this question.
I've experienced this issue once and resulted that it was due to the hl=X cookie and the fact that the cookie.
I suggest you check if it's also your case.
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RE: Incorrect Spelling Indexed In Meta Info - Can't Change It
Did you implemented the hreflang annotation using the sitemaps.xml methodology?
I'm asking because in this page https://newbridgesilverware.com/jewellery I don't see any hreflang in the code.
Another question... you're talking about a version for UK/IE and one version for the US, but I see only one site and sub folders like it could be /us/ for the United States ecommerce version.
So... are you dynamically changing the content (included meta titles) depending on user IP?
Because if it is so, then the hreflang doesn't work at all and you should, instead, check out this help page by Google https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6144055?hl=en, which is about Locale-aware crawling by Googlebot.
However, to be totally sincere, that Google is advising in red in that same page this: We continue to support and recommend using separate locale URL configurations and annotating them with rel=alternate hreflang annotations... makes me recommend you to forget dynamic serving and create two separate versions of your ecommerce and, once done, implement the hreflang annotations.
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RE: What is the best way to manage multiple international URLS
The answer of Martin is correct. Moreover, the use of subfolder at the start is a good way of giving some strength to the new geo-targeted versions thanks to PageRank flow through internal linking.
However, in the middle term, I suggest you to start monitoring if the new geo-targeted versions are earning enough traffic and conversions (both metrics must always go together) to eventually justify the migration, for instance, of the french version from the subfolder to a .fr domain name.
In the meanwhile, though, remember that, even if the new geo-targeted versions are living into the .com domain and earning authority from the backlinks earned by the .com site, you should consider them as if they were totally separate domains in terms of authority and relevance. In other words: you must build links for your /ie and /fr versions if you want them to really rank for competitive keywords.
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RE: What’s the best way to handle multiple website languages in terms of metatags that should be used and pages sent on our sitemap?
Allan, the Google resource is the base.
However, remember always that:
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Google suggests using always the rel="canonical", even if it's only self-referential.
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The href in the hreflang must always indicate a canonical URL. If not, Google will consider it a mistake and won't consider the hreflang.
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If you're targeting two different languages (i.e.: English and Spanish), the use of the hreflang is not strictly necessary, however using it is another signal you give to Google about how you want your urls target a specific audience based on language or language/country.
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RE: International Targeting | Language > 'fa-ir' - no return tags
Usually these kind of mistakes are caused by not using a canonical URL as href in the hreflang annotation.
For instance, if the url is www.domain.com/product-a?=color&id="red" and that same URL is canonicalized toward www.domain.com/product-a, but the hreflang suggest has alternate href an URL like this: www.domain.com/en/product-a?=color&id="red" as alternate URL for English speaking users, and this one too been canonicalized to its own non parametered version (www.domain.com/en/product-a), then Google will start telling that it doesn't see any return url... why, because in the canonical URL the href is not www.domain.com/en/product-a?=color&id="red" but www.domain.com/en/product-a.
The same is true in the case of the self referential hreflang annotation: it must be the canonical URL the one in the href element of the hreflang annotation.
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RE: Country and Language Specific URL Paths
This same question has more answers at this URL: https://moz.com/community/q/international-url-paths. so I close this thread for not having split them.
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RE: International URL paths
Before answering, it is me having a question for you:
why the hell do you need to put spanish content under a french subdomain if you already have it in the spanish version of the website? Is this nothing but complicating everything :-)?
Said that, as Steve said, the hreflang itself solves any potential duplicate issue, so you don't need to cross canonicalized any url. Simply remember to use the correct combo of hreflang ISO codes.
In the case of the spanish version of the french subdomain, the hreflang should reference the fr.sudomain.com/es/... and have as pair these: "es-FR", so to target only the spanish speaking people in France.
This way you are not going to messed up with the same kind of URL in targeting spanish speaking users in Spain ("es-ES") or in Great Britain ("es-GB") and so on.
However, it would have been more logical to have only one spanish URL for the videos, and have their hreflang set up as "es" only, so to target all users speaking spanish in every country.
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RE: Worldwide and Europe hreflang implementation.
In general that kind of implementation is correct.
I do something similar for a client, who has a similar problem but more on the logistic side (different warehouse depending on the continent).
Said that, considering that some products are only for the European market, I don't see useful to use an hreflang like the "de", which would target all the German speaking users no matter from the where they are... I mean, if they are in the USA, I believe that they are not allowed to buy products that are meant only for the EU geography even if they are German or Austrian.
Regarding IP redirection, it's not an alternative... moreover, it's not an alternative obliging people to be sticked to one country/website because that it not allowed by legislation now.
For instance, if someone from the USA want to see the EU site, he should be allowed to do it (this is also valid - obviously for Googlebot, as it is a user at the end).
What you can do is working on the basket process, and there using the IP recognition for allowing or not a bought depending from the country someone is trying to buy a product or not.
Doing so, you will also avoid the frequent dumping issue (e.g.: European buying in the USA because it is cheaper).
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RE: Canonical vs Alternate for country based subdomain dupe content?
In cases like yours, using the hreflang is the correct way to handle the duplicate content issue, because of the characteristics you yourself cite: currency and localization, which may be tiny differences in terms of "content" but huge in terms of usability and making completely different a product page from another.
Remember that if you canonicalize all the "duplicate" toward the canonical, the canonicalized URLs won't be shown in the countries you're targeting with those URLs... so screwing up the international SEO strategy 100%, so each URL must have as canonical its own URL (self referential), apart the obvious canonicalization rules being applied (e.g.: url with parameter canonicalized to url without parameter).
In case the URL is canonicalized for whatever reason, remember to indicate the canonical URLs in the href of the hreflang annotations. On the contrary Google will start alerting of no-return URLs errors.
Regarding the Moz Pro crawler... don't pay attention to it, because it doesn't consider the hreflang annotation,therefore it will continue saying that those pages are duplicate.