Absolute vs relative urls
-
Hello,
Should absolute or relative urls to be used for the internal links? I heard mixed opinions on that:
- One source claims that web crawlers prefer absolute urls as they are more understandable
- Other source points that there is no difference for web crawlers what urls are used and relative urls are shorter which reduces the size of a page.
Which option is recommended?
Many thanks
Darius
-
I agree that there's no longer any difference to the crawlers. However, one other thing worthy of consideration is the possibility of moving the site to a new URL. With relative URLs, you may be saved a lot of painstaking work, whereas with absolutes, every single page will have to be rewritten. There are tools to assist in the task, but it's still a lousy job to undertake.
-
Thanks for all the answers!
Now will have to evaluate all the pros and cons and make the decision. Good point that it has to be consistent
-
What is important is that you remain consistent. Also, I like absolute when pages use rewrite rules, URLs can get broke.
Personally, I always use absolute.
-
From a crawler point of view, I don't believe there is any difference. However, MaryAnneG makes a good point about scrapers. The downside of absolute URLs is they are harder to maintain, especially if you move to a new domain or change the structure of your site.
-
Years ago, the performance advantage of relative urls made them the better choice. These days, that's not a major issue.
One advantage to absolute urls: If your content gets scraped there's a chance that they won't bother looking at the links, so any traffic they pick up will be directed back to YOUR site instead of to another page on the scraper's site.
(Also makes it easier to find the thieves...)
-
Take a look at this thread: http://www.seomoz.org/q/disadvantages-advantages-for-this-e-commerce-url-structure
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Many have stolen our content. Rewrite vs. DMCA content removal?
Hello, We own a medical tourism website and many other sites have stolen (copied and pasted) our content. Our content is more than 2 years old, so we thought we could rewrite the content - but Which is a more wiser decision from you guys' experience? Archive our current content at a different URL and upload a fresh content in the current URL Claim our originality to Google and ask the stolen sites to remove our content. Thank you and appreciate your time.
On-Page Optimization | | joony0 -
Advice on related post plugin that doesn impacts on page load speed
I am looking for a related post page plugin for wordpress that doesnt affects to much on page speed Advice on related post plugin that doesn't impacts to much on page load speed
On-Page Optimization | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Categories and URL Structure - When to add a new directory?
I've been wondering this for quite awhile so I figured I should just ask. Suppose my website has 5 categories and the url structure looks like: www.mysite.com/category1/ www.mysite.com/category2/ do I also want to create a landing page for the above categories at the same URL depth as the homepage of the site? www.mysite.com/category1.html OR what about: www.mysite.com/category1/index.html Which is a better way to do this? Also, if your site began as fairly small and your 5 categories were your only other pages other than index, about, and contact pages (meaning you really had no reason to create separate directories), then as time passes, you decide to add 3 subcategory pages that would fit into a page: www.mysite.com/category1.html would you add a folder with he same name as the html page, and then rename the html file as index.html and place it into the new folder?
On-Page Optimization | | SEO-Pump.com0 -
Pages vs Posts
What are your thoughts on pages vs posts? I am setting up a new blog for a client but not sure how to structure the content. I may just do posts or a whole bunch of page listed down the sidebar. It seems like my pages always rank better than my posts. Has anyone else noticed this? Could it be because of the dates tied posts?
On-Page Optimization | | SixTwoInteractive0 -
Hierarchy and consistency in ecommerce URLs
One of the first things I remember reading about SEO and URLs, a long time ago, is that keywords are important, and hierarchy is important, for search engines and for users. Hierarchy in URLs would give the search engines an idea of the structure of the site, and users would be able to edit the URLs to continue navigating. I'm wondering about URLs, hierarchy and usability lately, since I've seen that ASOS uses a new URL structure on their site. At first glance, I thought it was brilliant, so I would like to get all of your opinions as well. For those of you that haven't seen the URLs: for categories, ASOS uses a structure as you would expect it, but for products they don't insert the category in the URL. Instead they insert the brand name as the first part of the URL, followed by the product title. Some examples: Category:
On-Page Optimization | | DocdataCommerce
www.asos.com/women/dresses/... Product:
www.asos.com/french-connection/french-connection-tie-waist-pocket-stripe-dress/... I can see the importance of brand name for a site like ASOS, and like how they stressed this by inserting not the category but the brand for products. I don't know how much ASOS still relies on organic non-ASOS related keyword traffic, but still. Now, for hierarchy, I guess a good internal linking structure will tell the search engines about the hierarchy of a site as well, right? So perhaps hierarchy in the URL isn't that important? Perhaps something like this would be just as good as anything, given a good internal link structure? www.onlinestore.com/category/
www.onlinestore.com/subcategory/
www.onlinestore.com/brand/product-title/ Now, I understand that if you use this structure, you wouldn't be able to have men/shirts and women/shirts, but let's say that you don't have subcategories that use the same names. In this case, how important is hierarchy? And, what do you think about this URL structure for an ecommerce site for which brands are important?0 -
Changing url in connection with meta title inconsistency
We run a site, which is a directory type one, where visitors can look for local businesses per city as well (at some point similar to the 'Yelp concept'). Now, we use www.example.com as the homepage, and the www.example.com/city1, where city1 is the capital of our country, is 301 redirected to the homepage, so this is your default setting. When you choose e.g city2, your url changes to www.example.com/city2, and the city value is stored in a cookie. Then, when you leave the session, and return to the site later on, you will see the homepage url, but with your previous choice of city (in case you let cookies be stored). My concern is, that the meta title always contains the chosen city name, so when you return to the website, and you previously used city2, you will now see the homepage url (which normally belongs to city1), but with the meta title of city2 or with any other previously chosen city. Does this mean a problem, and should I always use the correct url, which would be www.example.com/cityX, or this could not cause a problem for me? If it does, would you mind sharing me the exact problems as well? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Dilbak0 -
URL structure for a new WordPress site
Hi I'm building a new next big thing website from scratch (for a translation agency) and I encountered an issue with the URL structure. I need to chose the URL for important targeted keyword pages and I have a conflict between two tools I'm using. Please read below the situation: domain: mashtranslation.com target keyword: french translation services which URL you think is better from a SEO point of view (and possibly for users): mashtranslation.com/services/french/ OR mashtranslation.com/french-translation-services/ I'm asking this because one WordPress plugin (Wordpress SEO by Yoast) says the URL structure is not optimised while another tool (Market Samurai) says the URL is optimised.
On-Page Optimization | | flo20 -
Tool for Generating Sitemap/ URL List
HI, I'm looking for a tool that'll generate a URL list for a site. I looked at this thread here http://www.seomoz.org/q/online-sitemap-generator which came up when I searched for sitemap generator. However, I don't need a sitemap per se, and I don't need to submit it to Google - just a list of pages is what I need.If it updated automatically, that would be useful as well. Anyone know of a tool, on or offline? Or anyone used Xenu and know if it's what I'm looking for? Or is there a simple solution that I'm missing? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | 5225Marketing0