Just a quick question for the more SEO-savvy peeps. If I have a site www.xwz.co.uk which has canonical of https://www.xwz.co.uk/mypage and then the client wants to add www.xwz.ie to point to the same site, should the .ie site have a different canonical? I'm just thinking that both addresses will have exactly the same content. I could generate a new canonical, but should I?

Hey Craig... I'm am by no means an SEO expert, but I think the

hreflang

tag can be used for this purpose. https://moz.com/learn/seo/hreflang-tag This article implies that you should also include a canonical tag specific to the page's own language domain. https://www.portent.com/blog/seo/implement-hreflang-canonical-tags-correctly.htm I'd definitely welcome and confirming/second opinion on this though.

Yeah I'd seen about the hreflang tag but the two URL's point to the same site and language. I think I'm just going to stick with the .co.uk as being the canonical/authoritative one for now. Unless someone comes up with a strong reason not to.

Understood... yeah, sticking with the .co.uk as the canonical seems like a safe option to sidestep duplicate content issues. If there's an upside to using hreflang for the .ie domain, you could tag it as 'en-ie' if it brings any benefit.

The only reason the canonical exists is the exact reason you have in front of your Craig. You want to use the — same canonical value — on both sites. It should be the address you/client prefers to show in Google. You’re on the exactly right track.

As an alternative (and to prevent any downgrading of search ranking due to identical content) could you chose a primary domain over the secondary and have the secondary domain redirect to the primary? Though I do see there is merit to .ie vs .co.uk being targeted to the geographic audience, so hreflang would be the approach? https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/consolidate-duplicate-urls

Yeah, it was the downgrade due to effectively two URL's having exactly the same content that was my original concern. But if the client's aware of it and is happyto take the hit.......... At least the canonical will tell Google which one is authoritative I suppose.

Someone more versed in SEO.. does that canonical authoriative mean that searching on domain.ie vs domain.co.uk will reveal no rankings in searches? or show rankings but direct to domain.co.uk?

Canonical is simply telling google, hey treat this URL as this url

The big question is, do you want users in ROI to see the .ie domain or the .co.uk one? If you do want them to see .ie then hreflang is what you need, and not canonical.

But the language is actually the same. The site isn't in Irish Gaelic.

en, en-gb, and en-ie, should be valid hreflang?

Hreflang isn't just about language, it's also about geotargeting. You can target en-IE independently of en or en-GB.