TL;DR
At the moment you risk on multi store hefty penalties on taxons (up to manual action, Googles worse penalty) and on lower level also with products.
What I’d do would be to cram following set of features in one extension:
• sets of content per store, language and resource
• I would also optionally consider to serve different slugs
• Same store in different languages should provide approriate links to other language versions
• different store in same language should provide optional links to different language versions (
https://example.com <> https://example.it)
Also fallback content should be behind a feature flag as it’s a tradeoff decision:
• same content in same language space
Incremental Breakdown of problems per setup
Multibrand with same products on multiple stores in the same language (high risk of duplicate content manual action) such as in example.com example2.com
you need one title, description and content per store on taxons and possibile also on products or set the canonical link to the primary store practically telling search engines that one store is authoritive and give low to none relevance on search results on all the others. Otherwise you get flagged for duplicate content.
Same store across languages (with or without multiple stores) such as in
example.it and example.co.uk
No change required but correct setting of language tags in starter would be great to give a best practice example.
You can have some issues on edge cases if the iso of language is not defined in url or canonical thinking of
/it-CH/
/it-IT/
Or Spanish translations in the North America region (thinking of Mexico and US).
Multiple brands across languages (
examplea.com and exampleb.it)
No change required but correct setting of language tags would be great to improve seo
Some additional notes:
• search engines tend to be more lenient on products and more strict on product collection pages (I had personally a very long discussion about that when we acquired to other food delivery platforms in Austria)
• Taxons are at risk to get penalized, product pages to be ranked lower
• Generally given that there are many merchants that use manufacturer descriptions on products there’s a lot of more haggle room as google is able to distinguish that
There’s a really great article here that is relatively in line with what I can confirm as working related to same catalogue information on same language across multiple domains.
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-expands-ai-overviews-in-circle-to-search/538020/
This is the most comprehensive explanation for languages on google, I just couldn’t do it better even if i try:
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions