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For option 2, or 1 for that matter, would you use hreflang to do any of the targeting or just geotarget with WMT?

Yes. Beneficial information would be local events, customer stories/wins, press releases, local sales contact information, local partners, etc

We choose to target our sites based on where the regional/country offices are located. So in the example of South Africa our main African office is located in South Africa so the site content (events, forms, news) is based primarily on South Africa. That being said much of the content is duplicated from our main corporate English site. Our South African site mainly targets South Africa but could potentially go after any English speaking African country. Since the ZA site is primarily targeting a country with a duplicated language, is your recommendation to only geo-target via webmaster tools and not utilize hreflang? Most of our regions/countries do their best to translate the language on their sites but many follow the same tactic as my South African example, some content is local but most is a duplicate of our Corporate English site. What is the best tactic to not have duplicate content and to get the right sites ranking in the correct local version of Google?

Why would I target the main domain to a country that I have a subfolder for? My question is based on targeting one site (that is already set up via a subfolder) with the same language to multiple countries. What is the preferred way to indicate to Google that one site(or subfolder in this case) is targeted to the same language in multiple countries? Is this possible?

It may help to understand that my site is set up with multiple subfolders that target countries or regions. Some sites are translated and have local content for a specific country or region and other sites are in English but have content specific to that local country or region. I am worried about the sites that are in English but should be targeted to a specific region or country.

Hi,

I have a question regarding the country targeting aspect of HREFLANG. Can the same site be targeted with multiple country HREFlang entries?

Example: A global company has an English South African site (geotargeted in webmaster tools to South Africa), with a hreflang entry targeted to "en-za", to signify English language and South Africa as the country. Could you add entries to the same site to target other English speaking South African countries? Entries would look something like this:

• (cd = Congo, a completely random example)

• etc...

Since you can only geo-target a site to one country in WMT would this be a viable option?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Vince