I have a question on Google Indexing

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Masatake Wasa (wasaweb): Not exactly sure what you did there, however, it`s probably best to implement rel=hreflang (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077) with en-gb for the UK page and en-au for the Australian page, assuming the pages in question are equivalent for the respective countries and not the same (in which case, why make a copy?).
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  Masatake Wasa (wasaweb): I would implement hreflang since the pages are the equivalent (but distinct) for different markets. Canonicalization establishes the true copy of the content.
  
  When you had canonicalized the UK page to the AUS page, you were essentially indicating to search engines and others that the true copy of the content was the AUS page for visitors from AUS and the UK. I assume that was not your intention, thus you have removed it, however, if the AUS page had been appearing for UK results, then the canonicalization in a sense worked, since the AUS page had the combined authoritativeness of the AUS and UK pages and despite AUS-localized content (though how this combination of authoritativeness works is unclear).
  
  You`ve removed that canonicalization (which is correct, but in my view it makes sense to canonicalize URIs to themselves, so the UK page should have a canonical URI for itself, and the AUS page a canonical URI for itself), but you haven`t established the equivalence between the UK and AUS pages, therefore you`ve severed the connection between the two pages.
  
  My understanding is that hreflang is a swap: in a given language / market a page that would have ranked at a certain position would be replaced by the local equivalent (e.g. the UK page now would appear where the AUS page had appeared). I`m not sure about pooling / combining authoritativeness, however it`s not impossible that some of that goes on.