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Hello Steph,

I'm assuming you have read about hreflang tags. This is the correct action for your site.

On each domain that you have, you will need to have three link elements in the source code on each page.

For example, on the homepage of every domain name, you would need the following tags:

And on every other page on the site, you would need to replace the web address with the corresponding address of each language version of the page. This tells search engines the relationship between each page, and the language of each.

By using hreflang tags correctly, you will not be penalised for having duplicate content on each page.

That said, make sure that any text that should be different on each international version is indeed different. Ensure things like localised spelling, currency, and any country-specific information are specific to each country.

I hope this helps.

From a crawlability point of view, it does not matter. Search engines have no more problems crawling multiple sitemap files than they do crawling one very large XML sitemap file.

An advantage of splitting out your XML sitemaps is that if your site is very large, you are less likely to run into the 50 MB / 50,000 URL limit. If the site is quite small, you obviously won't benefit from this.

If you use multiple sitemaps, you may already know that you don't have to list them all in robots.txt. You can use a sitemap index file to point to your subcategory sitemaps (e.g. posts.xml etc.) Any modifications to the 'child' XML sitemaps do not need to be updated in robots.txt - you only need to remember to add/remove them from the XML index file and Google/Bing Search Console.

Since many site applications automatically generate XML sitemaps grouped by posts, categories and products etc., we find it's easier to use this default configuration - and simply add the sitemap index URL to robots.txt.

Yes, the region is ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2 which allows for 'BE'. The language portion is ISO 639-1 which allows for 'en'. Hreflang tag can contain both of these ISO abbreviation standards together.

I found this article to be exceptionally helpful in answering the same question

http://www.knowonlineadvertising.com/discrepancy-between-omniture-and-google-analytics/