This may be due to not using the ISO formats for language and country correctly (ISO 639-1 and ISO 3166-1 Alpha 2, respectively), not having a bidirectional reference (it indicates that the Spanish page corresponds to the English page, but this is not indicated on the English page), mixing hreflang tagging with incorrect rel canonical tagging, or simply using hreflang when we should not.
Example: when our content is completely different between differen code phone number philippines t languages, as in the case of a blog in different languages, with completely different content strategies for each country.
4.- Duplicate content in the same language
When we have multi-country websites (either on the same website or through different ccTLDs) it is very common that we have to replicate exactly the same content (except perhaps differentiating the currency when necessary).
Is it something that is wrong in itself?
No, not at all, as long as we can clearly indicate the relationship between the pages so that two contents in the same language, for example, do not “compete” in the same local search engine.
A correct hreflang configuration is enough to achieve this, but it is important that the correct strategy has been applied from the beginning.
5.- Not having a sufficiently culturally diverse team
Mind you, I don't mean that any startup that wants to expand internationally has to have partners and/or employees in key positions necessarily from different countries, and even less necessarily from all the countries where it wants to expand.
I think the important thing is that one or more of the partners or other key people in the startup are culturally open people, who have lived in different countries and who naturally understand that “what's here” is not necessarily better than “what's abroad” and, above all, it does not necessarily work the same way in different countries.
Of course, cultural differences and barriers to entry to understanding and adapting to a region can vary considerably.
For a Spanish startup, Portugal (very close) is not the same culturally as South Korea (very unknown), but if we have an open and curious attitude towards what is different (something that any entrepreneur should have) it will be easier to adapt our company to very di