Google has announced in October 2017 that country services are labeled by them on the Google apps for maps, desktop search and iOS mobile Internet. Today the Google labeling service for the countries for the mobile devices has changed. Now choice of country service is not indicated by domain. Now country service is linked to the area. A person lives in Australia will get country service in Australia. When the person travels in Philippines the country service will automatically change to Philippines. The result depends on the location or the location settings of Google.

How Google works?

This makes sure that you obtain the most useful result depending on the location. This small change has a great impact for the sites that work in many markets. Before the update in October, duplicate or almost duplicate web pages are kept together in the index of the Google. One version would display as it was taken as the canonical version. Frequently it would be improper country version or language of a web page that are displayed to users. For instance, if the web pages were same in Canada and US, viewers searching for Canada might obtain US version of the website. Google want to display the best version of the page that matches the users and hreflang tags.

Prior to Update

Representatives of Google have told that webpages were together before the update due to duplicate content. Return links are not seen by them on behalf of hreflang tags and those content were folded by Google. This was for making the website stronger by having some quality web pages. Since multiple versions of the same page were crawled and seen by Google, it has decided to take one main version as index. Other pages were folded by the Google together.

Info: domain/page would inform whether the version of the page or canonical version was indexed. If it displays different page then folding took place. This will end with improper versions displaying in the search engine result pages.

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