I work on an international e-commerce site which uses subdirectories/subfolders (www . domain . com/uk) to target localised users.
We use hreflang meta tags in page and individual subdirectory sitemaps to identify all other localised versions of pages with self-referencing canonicals. Subdirectory: /uk sitemap example below:
<loc>https:// www . domain . com/uk</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https:// www . domain . com/us" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https:// www . domain . com/fr" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-ch" href="https:// www . domain . com/ch" />
I then use a sitemap index to list our individual sitemaps for each subdirectory. Is this best practice? I have seen certain sites suggesting that we shouldn't do this.
However if I have a single sitemap, instead of multiple with a sitemap index, then I would need to select a canonical to which all subdirectory versions link to. See example below:
<loc>https://www . domain . com</loc>
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="https:// www . domain . com/uk" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https:// www . domain . com/us" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr-fr" href="https:// www . domain . com/fr" />
<xhtml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="de-ch" href="https:// www . domain . com/ch" />
Although the above makes sense to me, our root domain pages are not accessible and from what I have read; each localised version of a page should have all hreflang links and a self-referencing canonical. If each localised page should have a self-referencing canonical then, in my opinion, there is no way to create only one sitemap as <loc> acts as a canonical indicator to crawlers. Therefore the sitemap would suggest that the canonical for www . domain . com/us is: www . domain . com and the meta tags in page would state the canonical is: www . domain . com/us . Not great SEO work.
All pages have auto-redirect rules based on user IP data, with a fall back set to the x-default (/uk*). Google also suggests not to use auto-redirects and I'm happy to remove them. I just need to know best practice for handling international site structure before I do.
Should I make the root domain versions of the pages (www . domain . com/example) accessible for users? If so should they be simply for x-default users or should I remove the /uk subdirectory?
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from Search Engine Optimization: The Latest SEO News https://www.reddit.com/r/SEO/comments/avctsj/international_sitemap_structure_canonical/>
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