Indexing problems with an one year old webshop

Google considers the different language versions of a page as duplicates

[doc_z]

We have a webshop for the six countries Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, France and Denmark. We have a total of 15 language versions for the six countries. For example, the pages in Belgium exist in French, Dutch, German and English. The different language versions are sorted in different folders like "fr-be", "nl-be", "de-be" or "en-be". We have linked all language versions of a page with hreflang tags and all pages have a canonical tag.

E.g.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/en-be">
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/fr-be" hreflang="fr-be" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/nl-be" hreflang="nl-be" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/de-be" hreflang="de-be" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-be" hreflang="en-be" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/nl-nl" hreflang="nl-nl" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-nl" hreflang="en-nl" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/fr-lu" hreflang="fr-lu" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/de-lu" hreflang="de-lu" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-lu" hreflang="en-lu" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/fr-fr" hreflang="fr-fr" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-fr" hreflang="en-fr" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/it-it" hreflang="it-it" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-it" hreflang="en-it" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/da-dk" hreflang="da-dk" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com/en-dk" hreflang="en-dk" >
<link rel="alternate" href="https://www.example.com" hreflang="x-default" >

However, we have massive indexing problems. More than one year after launchning the shop, still many important pages (linked in the menu) are not indexed. Especially, we have the problem that usually only one version of the respective language is indexed by Google. For example, there are three French versions. In the Search Console, however, we can see that only one of the three versions is indexed and the other two versions are considered duplicates.

We don't have a ton of backlinks but at least some high quality links pointing to the shop. Moreover, we have redirected (301) our old shops for France, Denmark and Italy to the new one. Even pages which are correctly redirected are not indexed.

Anyhow, the indexiering problems are still there. Especially the fact that Google seems to ignore canonical and hreflang and treat pages as duplicates is annoying. Also, the number of indexed pages is decreasing the last weeks.

Any ideas, what else can we do?

[not2easy]

When you 301 redirected the old shops to new localized content, Google expects each page to land on its replacement page. If it lands on a generic localization directory that is seen as a soft 404 because the old URL does not seamlessly serve the new version. They expect a click on the old URL to provide the new results of the old page at the new site. I don't know if that is the basis or not so I mention it.

Google has additional ways to let them know about localized versions of content, instead of using markup, you can submit language version information in a Sitemap.

I do not offer localized results, so this is from Google's site, not my own experience. I hope others with their own experience can offer better ideas.

Google's "how to" suggestions: [developers.google.com...]

[doc_z]

When we set up the redirects, we redirected the individual old URLs to matching new URLs.

I should mention that the shop was only for Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands at the start of 2022. In these countries, we did not have any old shops to redirect. Even at that time, there were already indexing problems. We had hoped that the situation would improve with the redirects to Denmark, France and Italy, but unfortunately this was not the case.

So far, we have worked exclusively with HTML tags for the localised versions. We have XML sitemaps, but these do not contain the link to the other language versions. This is a point that can be addressed - thank you for pointing this out.

Perhaps there is also someone else who has their own experience...

[RedBar]

Some of your questions are answered in my post here
[webmasterworld.com...]

[doc_z]

In the meantime we changed our sitemaps e.g.
<pre>
<url><loc>https://www.example.com/fr-fr/voiture</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-be" href="https://www.example.com/en-be/car"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl-be" href="https://www.example.com/nl-be/auto"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-be" href="https://www.example.com/de-be/auto"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-be" href="https://www.example.com/fr-be/voiture"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl-nl" href="https://www.example.com/nl-nl/auto"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-nl" href="https://www.example.com/en-nl/car"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-lu" href="https://www.example.com/fr-lu/voiture"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-lu" href="https://www.example.com/de-lu/auto"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-lu" href="https://www.example.com/en-lu/car"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https://www.example.com/fr-fr/voiture"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-fr" href="https://www.example.com/en-fr/car"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="it-it" href="https://www.example.com/it-it/auto"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-it" href="https://www.example.com/en-it/car"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="da-dk" href="https://www.example.com/da-dk/bil"/>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-dk" href="https://www.example.com/en-dk/car"/>
</url>
</pre>

Unfortunately, the problems are still there. Especially with French versions in France, Belgium and Luxembourg, Google seems to have problems.

With the International Targeting tool in the old Google Search Console, the problem could probably have been solved easily and quickly... ("Google will continue to support and use hreflang tags on your pages. However, the ability to target search results to specific countries using Search Console country targeting was determined to have little value for the ecosystem, and is no longer supported." lol)