Hey Karen,

As to getting back to you so quickly: I was in the neighborhood and happy to assist

I am assuming product schema, but LMK.

With some of our content, we actually are training copywriters to put the schema in. Now, I would not do this in ecommerce as it is a different dev cycle/approach. But, for review or person schema, etc. its not a bad thought.

Each of our copywriters have pay changes based on learning and achievement. (No, we are not making them devs and they are judged based on content quality as well.)

I believe that every kid should learn basic html, etc. and am even starting a program where we provide a dev to a school to teach coding to middle schoolers (We pay the dev and the school/kids pay nothing). If they can be taught with all they are going through, anyone can. We are approaching a place where most will need basic html, etc. and schema ain't that tough.

LMK how it goes. You can even PM me.

Best

Digirank,

I do not see how you could use it for that, but admittedly have kicked your ball over to our head of dev just to be sure. Curious, how would you want to use it for schema given it is set to be more for tracking?

Best

Maxime,

I saw this too, and there are certainly variants. Given, that for Google I have generally used WMT as the final source and usually that worked, I lean a bit more that way. But, your point is well stated and not wrong. For purposes of being absolutely safe, it will not hurt to have the hreflang attribute there. A better question might be: is it really necessary given the you have ccTLD's and the same language?

From WMT:

Some example scenarios where rel="alternate" hreflang="x" is recommended:

• You translate only the template of your page, such as the navigation and footer, and keep the main content in a single language. This is common on pages that feature user-generated content, like a forum post.
• Your pages have broadly similar content within a single language, but the content has small regional variations. For example, you might have English-language content targeted at readers in the US, GB, and Ireland.
• Your site content is fully translated. For example, you have both German and English versions of each page.

I will assume that it is a given that google uses the ccTLD as the indicator of country and that it is considered a "Strong" signal to Google.

WIthin GWMT re: multilingual/regional sites (the bolded/italics are mine

Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to "hide" the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a "noindex" robots meta tag. However, if you're providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both __example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately. In addition, you should follow the guidelines on rel-alternate-hreflang to make sure that the correct language or regional URL is served to searchers.

Again, thanks for the replies. I find it really helpful to discuss back and forth as it adds to the learning adventure we are all on.

Best to you,

Robert

C

This is one of the reasons I love this forum: it requires thinking because many who ask questions are thinking. (think about it;) While I understand what eyepaq is saying in one sense that search engines "could" treat them as stand alone; it appears search engines do/could because as the subdomain holder you are not seeing links going only to the main domain or other subs, you are the one who controls it, can move its hosting, etc.  But, according to Google, they do not in the sense of linking:

If you own a site that’s on a subdomain (such as googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com) or in a subfolder (www.google.com/support/webmasters/) and don’t own the root domain, you’ll still only see links from URLs starting with that subdomain or subfolder in your internal links, and all others will be categorized as external links. We’ve made a few backend changes so that these numbers should be even more accurate for you.

Note that, if you own a root domain like example.com or www.example.com, your number of external links may appear to go down with this change; this is because, as described above, some of the URLs we were previously classifying as external links will have moved into the internal links report. Your total number of links (internal + external) should not be affected by this change.

So, as for external linking, it is clear that if there ever was a question about domains and subdomains, there is none now. But, that does not mean you should not use subdomains. Eyepaqs point around user abuse is an excellent one, but you should also be monitoring this like a hawk.

At the end of the day, I would think that using subdirectories is going to be easier if you are planning on a large site. But, the ease you mention for the user with the short domain name is intriguing. I agree with Muhammad on sub domains might get a little expensive and, if your choice is to use both (I wouldn't as it seems to me that you are creating more and more work for your dev team) the canonical should be the subdomain.

Again, thanks for the thought provoking question.

Robert

Sherry,

First, you are going to use Google US or Google Mexico. Next, you are looking for odd queries that will not exist. Try searching on ropas and then vender ropas. Or try searching on abogados. What you will see is that the results are all over the place. The most telling is ropas - search returns everything from the designer by that name, rock/paper/scissors game, ropas (as clothes in ES), etc. If you then look at abogados, you see the attorneys who get multilingual and those who don't. 
I was talking with one of our fluent Spanish speaking SEO's and we stuck in zapatos rojos. (Red Shoes). I am a big believer in what an excellent company Zappos is, but their ad returned a Spanish title with totally English ad.

If you type in English and Spanish, (which is going to be rare, I repeat - rare) you will see what comes up and you can do the KW research on the terms.

I will say to you what I say to many: If this is not something you are strong in, find a company that will work with you and let you learn as you work with your client and them. (Get an upfront agreement that they cannot approach, etc., NDA,). I can tell you I am not too proud to ask for assistance and recently contacted a European SEO firm re a Chinese site we are going to handle. I will work with them as I have no experience in that market or with Baidu directly. You cannot be afraid to say you don't know it all in this business. Trust me, I am here to learn just like you.

Best