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Hi all,

I'm running an international website across 5 regions using a correct hreflang setup.

A problem I think I have is that my blog structure is not standardized and also uses hreflang tags for each blog article.

This has naturally caused Google to index each of the pages across each region, meaning a massive amount of pages are being crawled.

I know hreflang solves and issues with duplication penalties, but I have another question.

If I have legacy blog articles that are considered low quality by Google, is that counting against my site once or multiple times for each time the blog is replicated across each region? I'm not sure if hreflang is something that would tell Google this.

For example, if I have low quality blog posts:

blog/en-us/low-quality-article-1 
blog/en-gb/low-quality-article-1 
blog/en-ca/low-quality-article-1

Do you think Google is counting this as 3 low quality articles or just 1 if hreflang is correctly implemented?

Any insights would be great because I'm considering to cull the international setup of the blog articles and use just /blog across each region.

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.

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!

Hi All,

I'm trying to find more information on what IP address Googlebot would use when arriving to crawl your site from an external backlink.

I'm under the impression Googlebot uses international signals to determine the best IP address to use when crawling (US / non-US) and then carries on with that IP when it arrives to your website?

E.g. - Googlebot finds www.example.co.uk. Due to the ccTLD, it decides to crawl the site with a UK IP address rather than a US one. As it crawls this UK site, it finds a subdirectory backlink to your website and continues to crawl your website with the aforementioned UK IP address.

Is this a correct assumption, or does Googlebot look at altering the IP address as it enters a backlink / new domain?

Also, are ccTLDs the main signals to determine the possibility of Google switching to an international IP address to crawl, rather than the standard US one? Am I right in saying that hreflang tags don't apply here at all, as their purpose is to be used in SERPS and helping Google to determine which page to serve to users based on their IP etc.

If anyone has any insight this would be great.