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Hi Thomas,

Thanks for the in depth answer. The only problem remaining here is about the products related to Europe only - and this is why we came up with the .eu solution. Since we need to show a few products to Europe only, we can't use a single gTLD (.com).

Theoretically we could achieve this with geo IP targeting, but this option means that if someone from France is within the US and searching a specific product appearing only to Europe, he would not be able to see it - and we don't want that to happen.

The dev company working for this client made it clear that they can't and don't want to produce multiple directories for each countries (website.com/fr-fr/, website.com/fr-en/, website.com/de-en/, website.com/de-fr/, etc.). Same goes for subdomains (ca.website.com, fr.website.com, etc.).

Don't get me wrong, I'm not a huge fan of using two gTLDs (.com and .eu), but I don't see how we could resolve the European products problem without this option. I'm also worried about the sitemap, using two gTLDs.  If you have an other solution in mind, it'd be more than welcome.

Hi Thomas,

Any updates on your thoughts ?

Hi Moz !

We're having quite a discussion here and I'd like to have some inputs. Let me explain the situation and what we plan to do so far.

One of our client has two separate markets : World and Europe. Both pages versions will be mostly the same, except for the fact that they will have their own products. So basically, we'd want to show only the European EN version to Europe and the standard EN version to the rest of the world, same goes for FR and ES. As far as IT, DE, CS and SK, they will only be present within the european version. Since we cannot target all Europe with a single hreflang tag, we might have to do it for every single european countries.

Regarding this subject, SMX Munich recently had quite an interesting session about this topic with a confirmation coming from John Mueller saying that we can target a single URL more than once with different hreflang tags. You can read more here : http://www.rebelytics.com/multiple-hreflang-tags-one-url/

So having all this in mind, here's the implementation we plan to do :

www.example.com/en/

Self canonical

www.example.com/fr/ - hreflang = fr

www.example.com/es/ - hreflang = es

www.example.eu/it/ - hreflang = it

www.example.eu/de/ - hreflang = de

www.example.eu/cs/ - hreflang = cs

www.example.eu/sk/ - hreflang = sk

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = be-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = ch-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = cz-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = de-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = es-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = fr-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = uk-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = gr-fr

www.example.eu/fr/ - hreflang = hr-fr

etc… . This will be done for all european countries (FR, EN and ES).

www.example.com/en/ - x-default

Let me know what you guys think.

Thanks!