Internal link question
-
Hello,
I was wondering if internal links should be full urls? for instance my coder might put "page-title.html" but I was wondering if its better for seo to have it be the full url "http://www.blah-blah.com/page-title.html"
thanks in advance..... I love this place!
-
I have been researching this further. If I want to change this on our large Website, I'm going to need major evidence that it's better and that it won't slow down our pages. In this article, Andy King makes the case for relative URLs. But he also says:
"Using the
base
element and mod_rewrite can alleviate the need for absolute URLs, and save additional space."Is this a true and accurate statement?
-
You are on the right track Dana. No, using absolute URLs is not going to cause a meaningful increase in server response time / page load time. I would look at other sitewide header/footer issues, javascripts / CSS and possible images on CDN etc.
-
I would recommend you to do absolute linking as its more accurate with less chances of any mistake in your internal linking effort!
-
Thank you Patrick for the link and Scott for the question. We just replaced all of our canonical tags with absolute URLs and i solved a lot of problems with weird URLs showing up as duplicate content in GWT.
UGH, but you both totally burst my bubble! I tell you what, just when you think you're cranking along in the world of SEO something comes along to humble you. Recently, I had been going through many old articles, some of which had absolute URLs. I was methodically going in and replacing them with relative links because we are on the page speed warpath right now and our IT director is convinced relative URLs reduce server calls and make the page load faster. After everything I read tonight, including the Yoast Post, it seems that the difference in page load speed between a page with absolute and a page with relative URLs is so tiny that it just doesn't matter. Furthermore, search engines my attribute more authority flowing from one page to the next on a site using absolute URLs for internal links.
Follow up question: We do not have gzip enabled. Our site speed is painfully slow (GWT reports average speed as 698 milliseconds) and we also don't have anything like the mod_deflate enabled on Apache....could the relative URLs in our case, actually have an impact on page speed?
If not, clearly I've got to circle back and undo the relative URLs I've put up on both of our sites in the past 2 weeks! ...sigh
Let me know - tomorrow's another day!
Dana
-
I would do full URLs. If your site gets scraped, you'll get a link pointing back.
-
I'd suggest using absolute (full) URLs whenever possible just to ensure you don't accidentally miss any relative URLs if you happen to move content/pages around. Yoast actually has a great blog post about why it makes sense to use full URLs whenever possible - http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/
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
-
Question about my website ranking
Hi everyone I have sports website. My website DA, DR is good. I have created good quality backlinks. But still my website ranking is not improving. Can you guide me how to improve my website ranking. Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | fktos.tam.906n0 -
To NoFollow or to NoIndex internal links
I all, I have recently taken over a fairly large e-commerce site that I am trying to "fix" and have come across something that I need a second opinion on. A Semrush audit has revealed that there are a heck of a lot of internal nofollow links (over 90 000) that point to predominantly 4 pages from the Header of each page in the site, these are change currency pages to show clients different currencies and a members login page. The pages are: /?action=changecurrency¤cy=EUR /?action=changecurrency¤cy=USD /?action=changecurrency¤cy=GBP /members/ My opinion is that these pages should just be no index pages and they should be followed. instead of being indexed and no followed? Any thoughts on this out there?
On-Page Optimization | | cradut0 -
Link to social network
I have very powerfull social network but i do not link to them from my website to improve page speed and avoid external links on main page. Althought i do link from my twitter acounts , facebook and google to my site. Should i link to my twitter or social on main page. I do not want to send people to there. I want to send people from there to my page.
On-Page Optimization | | maestrosonrisas0 -
How to view all 'followed internal links' on a page
I am trying to view all the followed internal links on a few pages of my website. The MOZ toolbar just gives me the total number of internal followed links. What is the best way to actually see all the internal links that are followed by the google bot from any particular page? Thanks in advance.
On-Page Optimization | | rjchugh0 -
Best practice for Portfolio Links
I have a client with a really large project portfolio (over 500 project images), which causes their portfolio page to have well over the 100 links that are recommended. How can I reduce this without reducing the number of photos they can upload?
On-Page Optimization | | HochKaren0 -
Too many on page links
Hello, I have a page that isn't ranking very well. http://nicontrols.com/uk/drives-motors/variable-speed-drives According to the MOZ research tools I have too many on page links. I believe most of these are a result of the advanced filtration options on the left hand side of the page. I don't want to remove the filters as they are extremely useful for customers but I am also worried about the number of links Anyone get any ideas about the number of links? Should I care?
On-Page Optimization | | DavidLenehan0 -
Site wide 301 or canonical links.
Hi guys, I'd like add code to my header file to specify www. as opposed to just http:// for the canonical links across my entire site. How can I do this? I'd like it to be site wide code that I can just add to my header.php file which is included across the site.
On-Page Optimization | | absoauto0 -
Canonical links
My website is relatively new, January. We climbed steadily to 6th for our search term then overnight rocketed to 1st. This only lasted a week and have been stuck at 9th ever since. When I use the SEO Moz tools our site should theoretically be top...I only joined today btw. Anyway in Google webmaster tools I noticed it said I had duplicate title tags, when I checked to see what the pages were- it was my home page! Google also seems to have cached two versions of our homepage, the root domain and the Default.aspx page. Now I have fixed this canonical linking issue today (using canonical link tag and 301s) so time will tell but has anyone got any first hand experience of this issue? Was it a big factor? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | SplashBacksNI0