I am a developer on a large site which regionally targets some content with a specific url. Is it technically correct to target the countries in those regions in the sitemap.xml
and point them to the regional url?
In a region like North America there are two or three countries that could be serviced by an alternate hreflang's (Canada, USA) but point to a common url: example.com/us
For example;
<url>
<loc>http://example.com/au/</loc>
<xml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-ca" href="http://example.com/us/" />
<xml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="http://example.com/us/" />
<xml:link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb" href="http://example.com/uk/" />
<lastmod>2015-01-26T12:12:59Z</lastmod>
<changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
<priority>0.5</priority>
</url>
Is this appropriate? I want to ensure that visitors from Canada know that there is regional content that is appropriate for them (despite the unfortunate regional directory name — 'us' rather than 'north-america'). Of course, I also want Google know that there is content for that locale as well.
Thanks in advance.