Main Nav Redirects Issue: Unnecessary Evil or Better Solution

[Bragg]

Hi,

I'm somewhat stumped on the best course of action for our navigation menu.

Our site is "divided" into two areas; informational and transactional. Because of compliance, transnational users have to be geo targeted; therefore, we serve them a specific page (we have 6 different regions: uk, aus, eu, etc). If users visit informational side, it's not geo specific.

Example:

• https://site/charts
• https://site/uk/money

Within our main nav, we don't specify the geo transaction page and use a generic https://site/money/ (page doesn't exist) then when a user clicks that link, we'll detect their location and serve up a 301 redirect to the correct geo page. This has obviously caused a ton load of unnecessary redirects and a waste of powerful link equity from the header of the site. It's been recommended to dynamically change the linked URL in this header based on the location of the user.

That sounds good but what about Google? Since we can't detect Google crawler IP, we would have to pick a default geo URL like /uk/money. If we do that, the other regional URLs suffer link equity.

How do we minimize redirects and make Google happy for all our geo pages.

Hope this makes sense and thanks for your time!