Hey,
We recently launched a US version of UK based ecommerce website on the us.example.com subdomain. Both websites are on Shopify so canonical tags are handled automatically and we have implemented Hreflang tags across both websites.
Suddenly our rankings in the UK have dropped and after looking in search console for the UK site ive found that a lot of pages are now no longer indexed in Google because the User-declared canonical is the Hreflang tag for the US URL.
Below is an example
https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet - is the product page
- is the canonical tag
rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-gb" /> - UK hreflang tag
rel="alternate" href="https://us.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet" hreflang="en-us" /> - US Hreflang tag
then in Google search console the user-defined canonical is https://us.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet but it should be https://www.example.com/products/pac-man-arcade-cabinet
The UK website has been assigned to target the United Kingdom in Search Console and the US website has been assigned to target the United States. We also do not have access to robots.txt file unfortunately.
Any help or insight would be greatly appreciated.
