I don't know of any "guide" by Google about how better design an international seo architecture.

However, of the two options you presented, the most common, correct and logic is the second one (domain.com/pt-br/), because the first is substantially burying the Brazilian Portuguese version of your site in the architecture.

Secondly, using the ISO schema "language-country" is also a good way to maintain the consistency in the site, also because those same pairs you will be using when implementing the hreflang annotations (and it is also a way to make understand what iso pairs your developers must use).

Thirdly, internet users recognize very well already what pt-br stands for

Finally, a note. If the brazilian portuguese is the main version of your site, why don't you create it directly in the root of your domain (domain.com directly in brazilian portuguese), when all the other versions will be in their dedicated subdirectories? This is the most common thing to do.

Multilingual are sites that target languages independently from where they are used.

Multi-country are sites that target specific country and language markets.

So, in your case, if you want to target all Spanish speaking users, you should go multilingual and the hreflang annotation should be:

Moreover, it would be better to change the subfolder URL to http://example.com/es/, because maintaining the es-ar subfolder will make people think that its content specifically targets Argentinian people

Correct answer.

I would only add that implementing the breadcrumb data vocabulary/structured data can help Google understanding the structure of a site, hence facilitate also the "creation" of good sitelinks.

On the other hand, it is plausible thinking that Google will present as sitelink those Urls that tend to be more clicked via search. The sitelinks, in fact, has also the function to help users clicking to the most "popular" Urls for the brand name/homepage search snippet.

We cannot control what sitelink Google will show, but we can demote those Urls Google is showing if we consider they are wrong or not useful.

Finally, your suggestion about geotargeting should not be taken into account if the site is multilingual.

Canonicals and hreflangs must be treated separately.

My rule, and this what I said at LearnInbound, from where SEMRush tweeted the tweet you embedded in your post, is this:

1. First set up and/or solve all canonicalization issues your site may have;

2. Once you have solved the canonicalization issues, you can work on implementing the hreflang only on canonical URLs (not canonicalized)

In that case of pagination the pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al have self-referential rel="canonical", so - ideally - the hreflang must reference to the corresponding pages 1, 2, 3, 4, et al of the same pagination in the other country and/or language version.

Finally, you are correct regarding the "view all" being the canonical URL of a paginated series.

Here the answers:

1. the hreflang tag doesn't slow down websites performance. it makes have an incidence only in the case you have hundreds of hreflang markups in the html code, so that in t case it is better to use the sitemap.xml implementation.

2. you site is only in English, hence you can't use the hreflang, because it is an "alternate", therefore it always needs a pair (eg: "e-US". using it only in self-referential way (as sometimes we do with rel "canonical" is wrong and Google will present it as a mistake and not consider it

3. if you really want to target only the US public, then you must geotarget the domain in Search Console, going to its "International" section and selecting United States as the country targeted by the site.

You are is wrong and misleadin, sorry.

The he is never redundant and an English site could also be targeting another country than the USA.

You're correct saying it's not useful in this case, but not for the reason you give

The example.com/widget-category/page-3 URL cannot have as href in its hreflang="en-CA" the example.ca/widget-category/page-1 because also this other URL - example.com/widget-category/page-1 - has that Canadian URL as href (moreover, that is the correct href for its hreflang="en-CA").

Hence, if you follow your first idea, you will be having a URL (the canadian first page of the paginated list) that will have two different hreflang annotations ( <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-1" hreflang="en-US">and <rel="alternate" href="example.com/widget-category/page-3" hreflang="en-US">, which is totally uncorrect, because you are telling Google to use two URLs for English speaking users in the USA, instead of one.</rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">

Sincerely I wouldn't worry that much. If you are using the rel="prev"/"next", Google will consider the third page of the US listing as a all with the first two pages, hence it should not start showing it in the index.

I personally prefer hreflang set up in HTML code, especially because is much easier to verify and correct than when it is implemented in a sitemap file.

Both answers above are correct and great ones.

From a strategical point of view, formally blocking russian IPs does not have any SEO effect in your case, because - as a business - you don't even need an SEO strategy for the Russian market.

The answer by Dimitri is wrong! (Sorry Dimitri).

The hreflang's href doesn't pass any link equity (use this definition, not link juice, please :-)).

It is a rel="alternate" and doesn't have any connection with things like 301s.

As your own agency told, I too consider that when the hreflang will be implemented, this kind of issues should terminate.

Regarding the sitemap error, it was surely something that could be confusing Google about what site to target.

However, I see that you have also an .eu domain name...

I imagine that that domain is meant for targeting the European market and I suspect that it is in English.

If it is so, remember:

1. In countries like Spain, France, Germany, italy... we don't search in Internet using English, but Spanish, French, German, Italian... Therefore, that .eu domain is not going to offer you those results you maybe are looking for;
2. The .eu domain termination is a generic one, and cannot be geotargeted via Google Search Console. This means that - by default - it targets all the world, hence, you probably can see visits from English speaking users in countries like South Africa, UK, IE, Australia, New Zealand or India, where English is the main language or one of the official ones;
3. When it comes to domains like .eu and hreflang, it is always hard to decide how to implement it. In your specific case, as you are targeting UK, US, AU and IE with specific domain names, the ideal would be to implement this hreflang annotation for the .eu (the example is only for the home page):

<rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="x-default"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.eu" hreflang="en"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com" hreflang="en-GB"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.us" hreflang="en-US"><rel="alternate" href="http://www.domain.com.au" hreflang="en-AU"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate"></rel="alternate">

With those annotations, you are telling Google to show the .com to users in Great Britain, the .us to users in United States, the .au to Australian ones and the .eu to all the other users using English in any other country.

That will mean that your .eu site surely will target also users in others European countries, both using english when searching (hreflang="en") and other languages (hreflang="x-default").

2 notes about the hreflang="x-default":

1. People living in the UK and searching in Spanish will see the .eu domain name, because it is the default domain name for searches in every language but English in GB, IE, AU and US;

2. Again, even if you pretend the .eu domain to target only European countries, that is impossible, because the .eu termination doesn't have any geotargeting power (and regions like Europe or Asia cannot be geotargeted via GSC). So it will be normal to see visit also from countries in others continents.

You are using bad the x-default annotation (I must admit, though, that I did not completely understood the code you copy/pasted in your question).

The x-default is meant for showing to Google what URL to show to those users, who are not explicitly targeted by a dedicated version of the website.

For instance, if we are targeting both USA and UK, but we know that the USA version has traction also in other countries like AU, NZ, South Africa and Spain, then we could use the x-default so to suggest Google that the USA URLs should be shown to all people independently of the language (in my example, not only English speaking users, but also Spanish speaking ones) and geography (not only the USA, but also all the others countries). The only exception will be the UK, because with the hreflang="en-GB" we are telling Google to shown the UK version of the site to English speaking users in Great Britain.

The only solution I see in your case is consistency between the two versions. You must choose with which architecture option to go and use just that. Only after you should think in the hreflang implementation.

Hi Mirko,

can we consider this Q&A as answered or are you still struggling with this issue?

My answer is the correct. See what I replied above to Dmitrii

Lol! You're right. I was indeed thinking about Belgium and not Netherlands

It's a cultural thing. I'm that province of Italy people talk or Italian or German, so if you want to target both with your multilingual site you must tell it to Google with hreflang, even if it is not listed in the ISO chart.

you do the same for targeting Spanish speaking people in the usa, for instance.

Yes, because if not you cannot geotarget the subfolders.

Rememover also to create the profile also for not www., and if you have also https, you must create also others 2 search console profiles for https://www.domain.com/es/ and https://domain.com/es/.

These are needed for telling Google your preferred domain version for indexing.

Yes, it exists (it is Alto Agide/South Tirol), and it's the same case of Netherlands (fr-NL and de-NL) or Switzerland (it-CH, fr-CH and de-CH)

Yes, you can.