How do you specify alternate pages with different content for users in different countries?

Question

I have two versions of my website one is www.example.com and other is at www.example.com/us for users from two different countries.

These two versions have the same number of pages and in same order. For Example:

The page at www.example.com/uri1/uri2 for users of one country have the corresponding page for users of another country at www.example.com/us/uri1/uri2.

These pages have same title, meta description and other descriptive content but different database content.

Now I want to specify to search engines that these two pages are for the same purpose but have different content for users from different countries.

I think there should be something that we use to specify different languages on a site as described here But I don't now how to do the same for different content.

Answer 1

If you really want to target individual countries you can use subdomains for this.

You see this with en.wikipedia.org and es.wikipedia.org. Wikipedia uses subdomains for different countries.

Each subdomain is treated as its own domain, and you can pass link juice to them through internal linking.

The reason why this is useful is that webmaster console allows you to have your domains target a specific country. And so if you really wanted to target Spain for instance, you can set up es.example.com in your webmaster console and target Spain for that domain.

As far as I understand it, Google does not have international targeting for directories on a domain. It only utilizes hreflang tags for languages. If you want to target internationally you have to do it at the root level.