Environment: I have two websites being eg. www.website.com and www.website.com.au. The .com is for a USA audience and the .com.au is for an Australian audience. These two websites are a part of the same company, with the same domain names, just like google.com and google.com.au for example. Though, they are both two separate websites which are hosted on two different servers, essentially two separate entities. They do have similar, and at times, exact same content on both websites since it's all the one company.
I coded so that each page automatically gets canonical and alternate tags based on the URL (so this is dynamic), and referring to each website, it is set up like this for example:
Australian website:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com.au/page1">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="https://www.website.com.au/page1" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.website.com/page1" />
USA website:
<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.website.com/page1">
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-US" href="https://www.website.com/page1" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-AU" href="https://www.website.com.au/page1" />
Question: Is this a correct set up? For each website I have placed an alternate and href tag for the native website under each Canonical tag.
Eg. AU Canonical with AU alternate underneath, and vice versa for the USA website.
Should I be adding an AU alternate Tag for the Australian website, and adding a USA alternate tag for the USA website?
*Note: I have tried looking into the best practice for this environment set up and situation, but I cannot find a clear answer for SEO regarding the alternate and hreflang tags. *
Kind regards, Neuc