Dynamic referenced canonical pages based on IP region and link equity question

[MattBassos]

Hi all,

My website uses relative URLs that has PHP to read a users IP address, and update the page's referenced canonical tag to an region specific absolute URL for ranking / search results.

E.g. www.example.com/category/product - relative URL referenced for internal links / external linkbuilding

If a US IP address hits this link, the URL is the same, but canonicalisation is updated in the source to reference www.example.com**/us/**category/product, so all ranking considerations are pointed to that page instead. None of these region specific pages are actually used internally within the site.

This decision was done so external links / blog content would fit a user no matter where they were coming from.

I'm assuming this is an issue in trying to pass link equity with Googlebot, because it is splitting the strength between different absolute canonical pages depending on what IP it's using to crawl said links (as the relative URL will dynamically alter the canonical reference which is what ranking in SERPs)

Any assistance or information no matter how small would be invaluable. Thanks!

[DmitriiK]

Either way, switching canonicals from one to another, it will do no good in terms of equity or in terms of spamminess. If you have hreflangs done, then you should be good.

[MattBassos]

I should of mentioned that hreflang tags are in place and working correctly with the pages for each country being indexed correctly. I'm more concerned about link equity.

[DmitriiK]

Oh boy..

Couple words come to mind - cloaking, black hat and penalization.

By definition, a canonical link is for telling search engines what page (singular) to rank INSTEAD of a page where a canonical link is specified.

Every time crawler bot goes to your page, it says "aha, i need to rank page A instead of the one I'm on right now". So if you "change your mind" every other time crawler visits your website, search engines will just disregard your canonical tags, thinking they are broken. As for link equity - link is always pointing to 1 page, and then that equity is passed to the page, which is canonically linked. So, if you change your canonical, link equity won't be distributed between new and old canonical pages, there is no such thing as "link equity memory".

What you might wanna look into instead is hreflang links - they are telling search engines that there are different pages, created specifically for different countries/languages/regions. However, in this case, content on these pages should be different/unique, serving specific needs of users in that specific country or region.

Hope this helps.