: How to use the canonical tag for multiregion websites and duplicate content We want to use the canonical tag for an multiple region website with the same content. For Example: www.example.com/services.htm

@BetL925

A canonical tag is used to tell search engines which version should be indexed. For example, you have a website with T-Shirts:


/shirts
/shirt/white/L
/shirt/white/XL
/shirt/red/L


In this situations you can use a canonical tag on all pages that point to /shirts, like:
<link rel="canonical" href="/shirts">

If you have a multilingual website, your structure can look like this:


/en/shirts
/en/shirt/white/L
/en/shirt/white/XL
/en/shirt/red/L
/nl/shirts
/nl/shirt/white/L
/nl/shirt/red/L
/de/shirts
/de/shirt/white/L


In this case, you will have to use the href alternate tags in combination with the canonical tags, this will result in:

For English:
<link rel="canonical" href="/en/shirts">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/en/shirts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="/nl/shirts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="/de/shirts" />
for all English shirt pages

For Dutch:
<link rel="canonical" href="/nl/shirts">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/en/shirts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="/nl/shirts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="/de/shirts" />
for all Dutch shirt pages

For German:
<link rel="canonical" href="/de/shirts">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en" href="/en/shirts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="/nl/shirts" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de" href="/de/shirts" />
for all German shirt pages

Regards, Peter

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@Chiappetta492

"Hack" it by using this meta tag rel="alternate" hreflang="x"

I recommend you checkout:


Source:
Many websites serve users from around the world, with content that's
translated, or targeted to users in a certain region. The
rel="alternate" hreflang="x" annotations help Google serve the correct
language or regional URL to searchers.


In the .htaccess file in sub folder /uk/ insert: DefaultLanguage en-UK and it should show HTTP header Content-Language: en-UK.

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@Berumen354

If you use the canonical tag like this you will find that the canonicalized content will outrank all of the other regions content and this will skew your traffic. If you are happy to accept that (and off hand I don't know any other way) then put the rel canonical tag in the duplicated content and point it to the original. A good guide to doing this is here:
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
If there is any scope to rewrite your duplicate content to make it unique I would.

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@Heady270

The canonical tag tells spiders and other automated thingies that all URLs that return pages with the same tag are all effectively returning the exact same page. I don't think you want to tell robots that your UK and US pages are identical unless they really are. Do they show different currency? Do they maybe even spell words differently?

Furthermore, extend the same concept to other countries that you may soon support. Your German page will be more significantly different than your US and UK pages are. You really don't want to confuse robots by sharing canonical address for pages in different languages and different currencies.

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