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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!

For the longest time, our company policy has always been to put PDFs in a secure folder (hence they are not indexed and do not appear in search results). After evaluating this strategy, there has been clamor in recent months to allow Google to index our whitepapers.

My question: Once PDFs start appearing in search results, what is the best way to start tracking clicks due to these "downloads"?

I have a multi-country website that uses country subfolders to separate countries. When I run a Moz scan, I am getting canonical related alerts (this is probably related to some of our US content being duplicated on the other country websites).

Shouldn't I be using href-lang instead since I am telling search engines that a certain article in country B, is just a copy of the same article in country A?