Hreflang, same language, different countries and Googles laziness

[Spiekerooger]

I recently experimented with publishing a site for three different countries in the same language (choose US, Canada and GB, e.g.) under three cTLDs (e.g. example.us / example.ca / example.co.uk) using hreflang-annotation.

GSC shows no errors about hreflang, third-party-tools go fine as well but what Google is doing is indexing just one content and displaying it with different url in targeted market. E.g. using the example.us content and displaying it with example.ca URL for Google CA and sometimes even just indexing one country version and not indexing and showing it for other countries.

Has anyone experienced this as well and maybe even found a solution for telling Google to display the right content and not just the right url for a targeted country? I've seen complaints about this at Googles Webmaster Forums but haven't read about solutions yet.

[riccarbi]

I didn't fully grasped your point; yet I'm afraid your are playing with fire. To publish exactly the same content in different websites will confuse Google and give you a gazillion of duplicated content problems. Google is probably trying to understand what is the primary source of your content (probably the .us if you wrote it using US spelling). If you create three websites for audiences located in the Unites States, in Canada, and in the UK you must use local language rules, dictionary, and spelling. And very probably that is still not enough, since AFAIK (I am not a native English language speaker) idiomatic expressions and writing style differ much from, say, US English and GB English. Therefore, you'd probably have to re-write your content targeting its style, grammar and spelling differently for every country, That said, I know from various forums and my personal experience that hreflang works better with totally different languages (for example, US English and Italian, such as in my case), and many webmasters have experienced unexpected problems with Google when implementing different websites for local / country variants of the same language.

[Spiekerooger]

Hi riccarbi,
I feel like playing with fire right now, as I see exactly the kind of problems you describe - but then I look at other sites with the same setup that do not have these problems, where:

- the technical setup is the same with hreflang and canonical in place
- the content is (as is at my site as well) mostly similar (but both projects respect local idioms, writing style etc.)

So it looks as if Google is not just following the technical setup with clear rules but somehow decides by chance if it should seperate the projects - each for its own country - or not.

I've checked several different internationalised projects and have seen projects where it works and where it does not work. Both groups share the same technical setup.

I feel like Google has some fuzzy rules here as if e.g. a 301 is a 301 on mondays but treated as a 302 on tuesdays :/