It is important to keep this in mind when deciding to set up with a .eu domain to target European users, as it might be more optimal to use a gTLD with specific subdirectories that can be geolocated through the Google Search Console and tagged with hreflang annotations to target each European country on an individual level.
International SEO positioning - Segmentation by continent
6.- Canonicalize all international versions of your website into a single one to avoid duplicate content problems
Sometimes, even when localization processes have been implemented, due to the nature of your business, you may end up having very similar content across different versions of countries that share the same language (such as English in the United States, United Kingdom, or Australia).
However, if these country versions are correctly geolocalized to their relevant markets, the content on these pages should not be seen as duplicates as they are targeted towards different audiences and need to be indexed individually to rank correctly for each country.
Therefore, you should not canonicalize URLs focused on different countries to a single one because each of them is original and the only one focused on each country.
Confusion can often arise from cross-canonicalization seen o philippines phone code n popular sites, such as the Airbnb example below, which shows how they have canonicalized the Mexican homepage to the Spanish homepage on the .com domain.
However, we do not know the context in which the decision to configure this was made and, on the other hand, we can see that in those markets where they have an active presence and a large volume of organic traffic such as the United Kingdom, France or Spain, they are autocanonicalizing.
International SEO positioning - Canonicalization
In these cases, to geolocalize and position the pages of each country version to their target market, it is recommended to geolocalize using either ccTLDs or subdirectories or subdomains that are registered and geolocalized to each country in the Google Search Console, and use hreflang annotations that specify the target language and country of each page, as well as its alternative versions.
7.- Implement hreflang annotations without following a process that includes validation
We could write an entire post about the common mistakes made with hreflang annotations.
In fact, I have written specifically about it in the past .
From using unsupported values to specifying the country without setting the language or even forgetting to include return tags or doing so in non-indexable URLs, among many others.
International SEO positioning - hreflang notes
In general, these errors usually occur when an hreflang implementation process that includes proper validation is not followed, such as:
Assess the scope of implementation by language and/or country
Identify those language and/or country versions that need to use hreflang, especially those with international search results, that are not aligned and can be prioritized.