(Entry was posted by Shao Chieh Lo on this post in the Dumb SEO Questions community on Facebook, 05/14/2020).

Where to land customers

In an ideal situation, we use hreflang to make sure people from another country does not land on en-us page.But, if we don`t have an alternative page for said en-ca since the product don`t sell in Canada, should we just let user landing on the en-us page that they cannot buy the product there? (Seems to be a bad UX to me) Or how should I handle this? let me know your thought or experience. Thanks,

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YOUR ANSWERS

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

Richard Hearne: Hreflang is designed to allow the signaling of appropriate language versions of a particular resource for users with specific language settings. It doesn`t allow you to stop users getting to a particular resource.

If CA users cannot buy the product you can use several techniques to message this to those users. A far worse UX is to send users somewhere unexpected, imo.

Alternative tactics include: set up a CA version of page that better manages the underlying issue of not selling in that locale, and use hreflang in the hope that Google will accept that signal and send CA users to this page.
Shao Chieh Lo: Thank you so much, so how the CA landing page should look like, it will be page with similar product available in Canada? Or the same content but with a banner saying this product is not available in Canada?
Richard Hearne: Depends on who owns the page I`d say. I think a bit more than a banner might be useful. You could add a form for people to register their interest if the product might one day be sold in CA. It`s very hard to answer this question, and the answer will most likely depend on the business owners.