I have a situation I need help with. We currently have a US site. We are planning to launch a new site for Asia Pacific using a ccTLD.

The content will be mostly translated but for the most part duplicated which isn’t a problem with a ccTLD (or so I have read).

The issue is they want to serve up some of our US content verbatim and in English.

Questions:

1) using hreflang will Google still treat the US site as canonical and the new site as a dupe or will it crawl the new site normally and index it in its own language

2) someone recommended using hreflang on both sites and use tags to indicate the US site is for all countries except those in Asia and the Asia site would indicate just Asian countries. The claim is that this causes Google to crawl the AP site more.

Thoughts (and thanks)