Multi-Domain Multi-Lang Canonical problem

Would this not ring some duplicate content bells?

[mipapage]

Hi there,

Its been a looong time since I have posted here, nice to see folks like buckworks again :)

I'm helping out a friend on their ecomm site which is built on prestashop. They had only Spanish for the longest time but are looking to expand into France and other parts of Europe and now have the site in Spanish, French and Portuguese. He has a domain for each country, and being Prestashop it puts each language on each country level domain; so each domain has the three languages.

I'm not 100% sure that this is a good thing. Would this not ring some duplicate content bells?

What would be a good solution? I've tried researching this but always just seem to end up confused :/

[Andy Langton]

Hreflang tags to point to the alternate languages, canonical tags or redirects to point to correct country-level domain.

So example.fr has hreflang pointing to Spanish (example.es) and Portuguese (example.pt). Example.fr/es/ has a canonical or redirect to example.es, example.es/fr/ points to example.fr, etc.

Obviously, it's best to avoid the duplicates, but if you can't do it, the above is likely to work reasonably well. Google has made some decent strides towards better handling of country-level duplication.

[mipapage]

Thanks Andy, your second paragraph is more or less what I thought, but then I was always able to confuse myself reading up about hreflangs. I'll get that enabled today!