Absolute V. Relative Internal Linking

[ktaylor310]

Can someone explain what the benefits/downfalls are of using relative links throughout your website as opposed to absolute links. I'd like to know how it effects spidering and ranking.

Also, if you are already ranking well can you cause problems by making a change from relative to absolute?

Thanks!

[Logan]

Hi Kim, either way is the same/equal to the search engines.

I wouldn't anticipate a problem/impact on the engines if you change links from absolute to relative or the other way.

[ktaylor310]

Thanks Logan. This is why I was I was wondering...

Most of your links from other sites will be linking to www.domain.com, not domain.com. If the search engine decides–for whatever reason–that they index your site with domain.com and not www.domain.com, then you could suddenly lose all of your search engine rankings because the non-www version of your site is indexed and the www version is not and you don’t have many links to the non-www version of your site.

It’s always good to be consistent in your internal linking, and it’s good to make sure that all of your internal links specify exactly the domain name of your site so there’s no question of which pages to index. (From www.billhartzer.com)

I've always used relative linking because most of my clients are re-designs. We keep their current site active while building the draft on my server. Relative links make navigating the draft and moving the site when finished much easier. Do I need to worry about the above?

[Logan]

Hi Kim. Couple thoughts. First to clarify, when I discuss absolute vs relative reference to the url then I am talking along the lines of

ABSOLUTE
h ttp:// ww w.mydomain.com/pagename.html

RELATIVE
pagename.html

Absolute refers to the entire domain/url being in place, while relative is just the pagename/directory structure based on the relative domain/dns

Regarding www. versus non, I agree completely with Bill's comments. When linking within your site stick with one versus the other when it comes to the www.

But you can still do relative links, as you describe, regardless of the www

I've always used relative linking because most of my clients are re-designs. We keep their current site active while building the draft on my server. Relative links make navigating the draft and moving the site when finished much easier. Do I need to worry about the above?

What you describe is ok, based on my experiences and how I've handled things with client development sites in the past.

Here is the trick for probably both Bill and I. Use Xenu Link Sleuth to spider/check your site for errors

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

It is a simple program. Just download, start and enter the url. It then spiders your site and provides you a report of any errors. Those are likely the same errors the search engines will run into. You can also use Google Webmaster Central to get any spidering errors directly reported by Google.

[ktaylor310]

I've used Xenu for years! I love it I always run it just after launching a site, so I think I'm good. We were on the same track about absolute/relative paths, I was just afraid there was a danger there I wasn't aware of. I did not include the following section from Bill's site...

Always use absolute links whenever you can. If you use relative links you can suddenly lose all of your rankings in the search engines–it has happened to me and was a nightmare for a few weeks until I got it all straightened out. All of a sudden one of my prized domain names stopped ranking in Google. I couldn’t figure it out. Great rankings for several years and bad rankings all of a sudden. I finally searched for the domain name in Google and found that they had indexed the entire site without the www subdomain.

I then found that there were a few links to the non-www version of the site. I figured out that because there were links to mydomain.com and because I was using relative links the search engine were allowed to spider the site thinking it was mydomain.com and not www.mydomain.com. Suddenly Google chose mydomain.com and threw out www.mydomain.com–thus my bad rankings.

[torka]

If you 301 redirect the non-www version to the www version (or vice versa) you won't have that problem no matter which version you or anybody else use to link to your site's pages. (Of course, you should still be consistent in how you yourself link, but you can't control what other people do.)

You can also specify via Google's Webmaster Tools which version you prefer, but that will only work for Google. If you use the 301 redirect, you cover yourself on all search engines.

I don't usually like to link to other forums from here, but over at High Rankings they've put together an extraordinarily comprehensive thread covering almost any server permutation you can think of with instructions for implementing the appropriate 301 redirect:
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/in...showtopic=5644

--Torka

[samflutch]

The beginning of the World Wide Web webmasters have been creating pages to entice visitors and read their well thought out pages. Sadly, with the birth of the WWW also came scrapers, copycats and good ol’ scrutiny.With only changing the way you link to pages you can get rid of one of these terrible three (if you consider scrutiny a bad thing that is) or at least make it non-threatening to your site.

What is Absolute Internal Linking?

Absolute linking is when you link to the absolute (entire) URI. For example, if your website is http://example.com and you wrote an article located at http://example.com/giraffe.htm and wanted to link to the page zebra.htm you would link to http://example.com/zebra.htm.

Alright, What is Relative Internal Linking?

Relative linking is when you link to the relative URI. In short, you link to /zebra.htm or ../zebra.htm.

[ktaylor310]

Thanks Torka, I'll read through that thread.

[kimrennin]

Always we should have to use absolute links whenever we can. If we use relative links we can suddenly lose all of our rankings in the search engines--it has happened to me and was a nightmare for a few weeks until I got it all straightened out. All of a sudden one of my prized domain names stopped ranking in Google. I couldn't figure it out. Great rankings for several years and bad rankings all of a sudden.

[spencer]

The only benefit I see is that the absolute links add more keywords on your page, if you have keywords in your domain that you are targeting.