You can 301 redirect some locale to your "base" URL if you want.
mysite.com/en-us/some-page > mysite.com/some-page
But don't stress too much. Google doesn't really care about URL content any more. People on phones don't care what your URL says. It's at most desktop users, and devs.
Don't stress localizing your URLs...
mysite.com/fr-ca/some-page is just as good as mysite.com/fr-ca/une-page... and the former is a lot easier to tie into email marketing variables.
Just keep your sitemaps in the localized folder.
mysite.com/sitemap.xml... just a link to the various localized sitemaps.
mysite.com/en-us/sitemap.xml etc.
By keeping sitemaps in a localized folder, it'll make it a lot easier for yourself as you go to register your site with each market's locale.
If you just have to localize URLs... consider doing what Amazon does and just tie the URL to an ID.
“We use the words in a URL as a very very lightweight factor. And from what I recall this is primarily something that we would take into account when we haven’t had access to the content yet… [but] as soon as we’ve crawled and indexed the content there then we have a lot more information. And then that’s something where essentially if the URL is in German or in Japanese or in English it’s pretty much the same thing.”
mysite.com/en-us/some-page mysite.com/en-ca/some-page
You can 301 redirect some locale to your "base" URL if you want.
mysite.com/en-us/some-page > mysite.com/some-page
But don't stress too much. Google doesn't really care about URL content any more. People on phones don't care what your URL says. It's at most desktop users, and devs.
Don't stress localizing your URLs...
mysite.com/fr-ca/some-page is just as good as mysite.com/fr-ca/une-page... and the former is a lot easier to tie into email marketing variables.
Just keep your sitemaps in the localized folder.
mysite.com/sitemap.xml... just a link to the various localized sitemaps.
mysite.com/en-us/sitemap.xml etc.
By keeping sitemaps in a localized folder, it'll make it a lot easier for yourself as you go to register your site with each market's locale.
If you just have to localize URLs... consider doing what Amazon does and just tie the URL to an ID.
https://www.amazon.com/Moen-One-Handle-Bathroom-Deckplate-84...
the above is the same as this... https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CFYPTKF8
And you can put anything you want in the URL string, it just matches on the ID.
https://www.amazon.com/literally-whatever-you-want-here/dp/B...
“We use the words in a URL as a very very lightweight factor. And from what I recall this is primarily something that we would take into account when we haven’t had access to the content yet… [but] as soon as we’ve crawled and indexed the content there then we have a lot more information. And then that’s something where essentially if the URL is in German or in Japanese or in English it’s pretty much the same thing.”
- John Mueller, Google Search Advocate.