Hello, we are facing some issues on our project and we would like to get some advice.
Scenario We run several websites (www.brandName.com, www.brandName.be, www.brandName.ch, etc..) all in French language . All sites have nearly the same content & structure, only minor text (some headings and phone numbers due to different countries are different). There are many good quality pages, but again they are the same over all domains.
Goal We want local domains (be, ch, fr, etc.) to appear in SERPs and also comply with Google policy of local language variants and/or canonical links.
Current solution Currently we don’t use canonicals, instead we use rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default":
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-BE" href="https://www.brandName.be/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CA" href="https://www.brandName.ca/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-CH" href="https://www.brandName.ch/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-FR" href="https://www.brandName.fr/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-LU" href="https://www.brandName.lu/" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://www.brandName.com/" />
Issue 1 After Googlebot crawled the websites we see lot of “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in Coverage/Excluded report (Google Search Console) for most domains. When we inspect some of those URLs we can see Google has decided that canonical URL points to (example):
User-declared canonical: None
Google-selected canonical: …same page, but on a different domain
Strange is that even those URLs are on Google and can be found in SERPs
Obviously Google doesn’t know what to make of it. We noticed many websites in the same scenario use a self-referencing approach which is not really “kosher” - we are afraid if we use the same approach we can get penalized by Google.
Question 1: What do you suggest to fix the “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” in our scenario?
Issue 2 We create the same ad in Google Ads for 2 domains. So the content is mostly identical, ads are identical, target URLs differ only in domain. Yet Google Ads “Quality score” is different (10/10 vs. 6/10) and “Landing page experience” is very different (Above average vs. Average). Some members of our team think lower “Landing page experience” increases the Google Ads costs, which I personally don't believe, but I want to double check.
Question 2: Can “Duplicate without user-selected canonical” issue decrease the “Landing page experience” rating and as result can it cause higher Google ads costs?
Any suggestions/ideas appreciated, thanks.
Regards, Alex
