The Situation
Multinational company has one website for each country it operates it. These websites use country-specific TLDs (e.g. example.au, example.ca, example.co.uk, example.de and so on). Websites contain information about the company’s various products. The product pages for .de are in German but the pages for .ca, .au, .co.uk and .us are all in English. So all of these pages have pretty much the exact same content. The company really wants its .au site to appear in SERPs in Australia and .ca in Canada and so on. So they create all these separate websites, use the same content on product pages on each site, and use Hreflang with “en-US”, “en-CA”, “en-GB” and “en-AU”.
What Google Does
Googlebot finds all these pages that are Hreflang’ed but are essentially duplicate content. So Google ignores the weak duplicates and ends up showing your .uk site in SERPs in Australia. What’s more, when Google does this sort of folding of duplicate pages into a different page, any Hreflang tags from those duplicate pages are ignored. So the Hreflang’ed pages get the missing return tag error in the search console. Continue reading Hreflang and Duplicate Content