Multilingual site and issues with homepage on GSC

Question

I have a challenge here: my client has the homepage for each location added to the main website property and not in the URL prefix profiles for any locations.

What I mean is...

GSC as usual, has a website property profile like

• website.com

And for the specific location URL prefix as subfolder like:

• website.com/en-ca/ or /en-au/ and so on.

Now what happens is that the homepage URL is like this:

The homepage for each location is like this: www.website.com/en-ca

• Without the last slash.

This means that the homepage is only visible to the main GSC website property and not in the URL prefix profiles subfolder as website.com/en-ca/

Leaving without any data related to the homepage for any specific URL prefix profile in GSC.

I need help finding something related to this topic if this is a good practice or not. Or how google reads the homepage or what URL Google identifies as a homepage from specific multilingual sites. Will this be a hidden penalty by google?

I'm recommending changing every homepage, like: website.com/en-ca/home

Same in Bing or Yandex.

Note:

• The status 200 for website.com/en-ca

• Status 301 for website.com/en-ca/

• Redirection set is 301 from website.com/en-ca/ to website.com/en-ca

Answer 1

First part of your answer:

The use of the last slash is completely optional. What you do have to take care is to only use 1 version. Either with or without, but don't respond to both.

In your example:

• website.com/en-ca <= should return a 200 code
• website.com/en-ca/ <= should return a 301 redirection code to website.com/en-ca

Second part of your answer:

In the case of multilingual sites, you have to properly setup hreflang tags. You must define a main "default" language, and refer to every other language in which your website shows info. An example header to guide you:

<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="https://example.com/en-ca" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/en-ca" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-au" href="https://example.com/en-au" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr" />

It's easy to make a mistake here. I recommend, once you configure your headers, run them through an online hreflang tags testing tool. There are many out there that can help you to diagnose any problems.