Internal linking dilemma

[StevenLevine]

My company is running a submission contest. All submissions will live on the the main contest page. When clicked, each submission will open up into their own page (with a unique URL). Each submission will also have internal links pointing to a few relevant product pages.

My question: Say we receive 1,000 submissions. Is it better to have internal links from 1,000 unique, lower authority submission pages? Or should we canonicalize each submission page to the higher authority main contest page and effectively have all those internal links coming from the main contest page? Is one better than the other? Are there link spam issues to worry about with either?

Thank you in advance!

[EGOL]

Canonicals are intended to connect verbatim copies.  If you get a submission, it will be significantly different from the main contest page. So canonical is not applicable.

We observed that Google stopped honoring canonicals where the two pages were quite different sometime between November 6 and November 13, 2016.

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[iugac]

I agree.