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Went Hot: June 5, 2008 - 5:37 pm
Posted By: mrconn 84 days ago
Topic Type: News Story (Jump to http://www.searchenginejournal.com)
Category: Link Building
For those who don't know what this is, basically its cross linking internal pages using either the FULL URL of the physical location of the page or file or using the partial URL such as /about.html vs yourname.com/about.html
What are your thoughts about this?
7 Comments
Comments
>>>To some SEO questions there are no definitive answers unfortunately. Using absolute or relative URLs to interlink related site subpages is just such a question.
I was on a panel with Matt Cutts at SMX West and when asked that question (absolute vs. relative) he said the more hints you can give a search engine to prevent confusion, the better and then clarified that his recommendation was absolute linking. Seemed like a definitive statement to me.
dag - when you look at the number of reasons for absolute vs relative, kinda' makes you lean towards absolute . . . .
and a simple find and replace script can change the domain name on moved content rather quickly. Kind of leaves the cons list limited.
Atleast for me with the experiments i've been doing - absolute > relative.
I'd rather worry about the SEO and usability of client's sites rather than fast page load times.
so, is using the base tag the same as using absolute? would that still comply with matt cutts comment that rae referenced?
no matter, but in posts better to have absolute URLs
Begin the URL with a slash so that it counts from the root, or include the full domain name and path. Your choice.
If you omit the domain name, you can save on code bloat, but do:
- begin the URL with a slash so that it counts from the root,
- make sure that your www and non-www canonicalisation is fixed (301 redirect to www),
- use the base tag to clarify the base domain for all internal linking.
Avoid fully relative URLs in internal links, always start with a slash or with the domain name.