David Craig 🦣@johnmu Hi - we have a situation with pages from a German (/de-de) version of a global website being dispayed on https://www.google.ch/ instead of the Swiss pages (/de-ch). Apart from making sure hreflang is ok, is there anything we can do with the Swiss pages (/de-ch) to make they rank instead of german pages (/de-de) ? e.g adding a Swiss postal address in the copy or schema. Please note both de-de and de-ch versions are in German. Thank you - hope this makes sense
John Mueller@seoconsultantscornwall @searchliaison It's often a case of the content just being significantly similar. Hreflang can help show the right URLs, but in Search Console reporting it'll still show the canonical ones.
Since you can't guarantee only visitors from one country, the recommendation is to show a banner in a non-indexable way (eg, robotted JS, iframe, etc) to users who end up on the "wrong" country version, to guide them to the correct one (don't automatically redirect).