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Hi Kate,

Yes, they are geo-targeted versions of the site, but the idea would be to create multilingual versions of the site for other territories in the future, so the hreflang + country targeting seemed to be the best option to allow for future expansion in the site framework.

The site was working correctly for about a month before Google started showing country subfolders as sitelinks for the main domain.  However, the correct locale sub-pages are still being shown for other search terms.  Seems to be an issue with the home page or branded search, where the correct country homepage is no longer being shown as the main result, and instead as a sitelink beneath the domain.

Ro

Hi There,

Just wondering if you can help.

Our site has 3 region versions (General .com, /ie/ for Ireland and /gb/ for UK), each submitted to Google Webmaster Tools as seperate sites with hreflang tags in the head section of all pages.  Google was showing the correct results for a few weeks, but I resubmitted the home pages with slight text changes last week and something strange happened, though it may have been coincidental timing.

When we search for the brand name in google.ie or google.co.uk, the .com now shows as the main site, where the sitelinks still show the correct country versions.  However, the country subdirectories are now appearing as sitelinks, which is likely causing the problem.  I have demoted these on GWT, but unsure as to whether that will work and it seems to take a while for sitelink demotion to work.

Has anyone had anything similar happen?  I thought perhaps it was a markup issue breaking the head section so that Google can no longer see the hreflangs pointing to each other as alternates.  I checked the source code in w3 validator and it doesn't show any errors.  Anyway, any help would be much appreciated - and thanks to anyone who gets back, it's a tricky type of issue to troubleshoot.

Thanks, Ro