Absolute or Relative

[Nick S]

Hi,

Just wondering what peoples views are on whether absolute links or relative links are better for SEO.

Cheers

Nick

 

[dtm]

I would never write:
href="http://www.....co.uk/thispage.html" (Unless it was external of course)
always
href="./thispage.html"

Relative is usually the norm, search engines probably wouldn't care and would just strip off the absolute part, but it's more data, less efficient I suppose.

 

[Systreg]

I didn't know there was a difference, never heard the term absolute links or relative links before.

Internal and external links on my sites are always in the form of:

href="http://www.....co.uk/thispage.html"

I'm a creature of habit so always do it like that, same when I type a url in to my browser, I always type the www. before the domain name.

 

[donreeco]

I think relative links are generally classed as better practice - it certainly would make moving a website to a different domain easier.

Having said that someone from Google was reported to say, "absolute links have less potential for getting messed up [when Google indexes your page]. Even though it shouldn’t make a difference, I recommend absolute links"

 

[dtm]

Having said that someone from Google was reported to say, "absolute links have less potential for getting messed up [when Google indexes your page]. Even though it shouldn’t make a difference, I recommend absolute links"

I think this quote must be referring to people using bad syntax for relative links for example just using href="index.php" instead of href="./index.php"

PS. I think this should be moved to the 'Web Design Forum'

 

[Nick S]

Cheers, thanks for your comments.

 

[tifosi]

IMO absolute links should be for external links only.

For any project (read site as well) there should be a setting of the absolute_root (e.g /home/username), web_root (e.g /home/username/www), and optionally app_root.

using internal links is better practice - both absolute e.g /path/to/dir for 'relative' to web root (or //) and path/to/dir for relative. Windoze/apache have some quirks but relatively easy to workaround.

S

 

[CJB]

Absolute URLs

Using absolute links can help avoid canonicalisation issues and might also help you get a few links when other sites scrape your content so I guess they are better than relative links (at least from an SEO perspective).