I am working on a multi-national/multi-lingual eCommerce website, with the following website structures:
www.example.co.uk (UK Based English speakers)
www.example.co.uk/es/ (UK Based Spanish speakers)
www.example.co.uk/fr/ (UK Based French speakers)
www.example.es (Spain Based Spanish speakers)
www.example.es/fr/ (Spain Based French speakers)
www.example.es/en-gb/ (Spain Based UK English Speakers)
There will be a Blog Series, which will be placed on to each ccTLD; since its content will be universally useful. For example 'How to ...' and 'Top 5 XYZ' kind of articles.
The concern I have then relates to the issue of duplicate content. For example, there would be the following URLs:
www.example.co.uk/how-to-xyz
www.example.es/en/
The first URL will be targeted to UK based English speakers whilst the second URL would target Spain based English speakers. As such, the content would be pretty much identical and within the same French language.
The exception being, at the end of the Blog Article, there will be an Internal Link to its respective Product Category page that will house its Country Specific Currency. In this case, the first URL would contain British Sterling with its Spanish counterpart displaying the Euro Currency as follows:
www.example.co.uk/ (British Sterling)
www.example.es/en/ (Euros)
With this in mind, would this single Internal Link be enough to let search engines know that whilst 99.9% of the content is a duplicate, that it is in fact aimed at a different Geographical audience?
The reason for asking is that I see many articles, including Google's own, that also advise making use of the Canonical Tags. Whilst I understand the technical integration, I feel that such a use would reduce User Experience since both pages are looking to serve a different Geographical audience. For example, let's say I chose to set www.example.fr/en/how-to-xyz
as the preferred URL, then UK based users would be sent to an article that contains an Internal Link to a Product Category page, that displays prices in Euros rather than British Sterling.
Any pointers, on this matter, would be greatly appreciated.
HREFLANG
As a side note, I have implemented the relevant HREFLANG Tags, using HTML Markup as follows:
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="lang_code" href="url_of_page" />