Absolute vs Relative URLs
-
What are the pros and cons of these two types of URLs and what type of weight does this hold. It doesn't seem to be a big issue in regards to ranking.
Any qualified clarity would help.
-
I use a mix of both relative and absoloute, for navigation I tend to use relative links in case i ever move things around. However for content in particular articles or news pieces on a site i use exact links. I have found before that some of these have been used on other sites so including the exact link ensures that there is a link back to the website.
-
If your links are absolute and another site scrapes your content, those links are often embedded when they republish it. If you use relative links, those embedded links would not work and you wouldn't get credit for them.
Here is a relevant quote from Rob Ousbey from an SEOMoz post:
"I'd recommend absolute links in post/page/feed content in particular (so that any scraped content maintains the links back to you). For 'navigational' links, there's a variety of reasons why absolute links are still useful, such as making sure link juice flows to the canonical domain (eg: if you have a number of (sub/)domains that resolve to the same content)."
-
For SEO it doesn't matter at all. As long as your link points to a valid page or resource, the crawler bots will suss out the full URL.
I personally use relative links wherever possible. They keep the file size smaller, and they're more versatile if you restructure or move domains.
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
-
Having country in page url, good idea or bad idea?
Lets say i sell louisville hockey sticks if i have a page url as louisville-hockey-sticks-canada is this better than louisville-hockey-sticks I have a .CA domain
On-Page Optimization | | garmatinc0 -
Branding vs. Keyword Optimization for Company title.
I have a new SEO client that I am working on putting together an optimization strategy and have come across something that has me second guessing. Reach out to Moz Community... The client is a doctor who runs a tattoo removal clinic out of his office. Technically they are two separate businesses: doctors office and tattoo removal clinic. The tattoo removal clinic is my client. They have an independent website where they generate leads. The website is not the brand name. It is [city]tattooremoval.com. The logo on the site, heading, footer all reflect the web URL. The actual brand name for the company is used in all the directory listings, facebook page, google+, basically everywhere else on the internet. When drafting up new meta titles, putting together content, everything really, the website URL has primary keywords included making it way more convenient to use that. However I'm not sure how it will look to the search engines about having everything pointing to the site be one company title and when you get to the site not see the company title in the logo or titles and such. The company name is just down in the corner somewhere on the page. Anyone with any experience to a similar issue? On one hand I think I'm over thinking it, not having the brand name on the home page title tag shouldn't be a huge deal if the website delivers value to the customer. On the other hand I don't see a lot of companies that do this online in general (especially with larger brands), although research shows a many of companies in this niche using the [city] + keyword (or vise vera).
On-Page Optimization | | bricegump0 -
Correct .htaccess settings for canonical url?
I want to forward all urls to http:www.mysite.com but am a little confuse because I am getting duplicate content error: Pages with Duplicate Page Content as of Jan 15http://titanappliancerepair.com/ 1 duplicatehttp://titanappliancerepair.com 1 duplicatehttp://titanappliancerepair.com/index.html 1 duplicate*****************************************************************What should I put ion htaccess file so I can forwardhttp://titanappliancerepair.com/index.htmlhttp://titanappliancerepair.comhttp://titanappliancerepair.com/to http://www.titanappliancerepair.comor what is the correct way to do it?I'm confused because when I enter http://titanappliancerepair.com/ in browser it showshttp://titanappliancerepair.com so how can it be considered duplicate content?.Can someone help?I have godaddy and they have gave me this code to put RewriteEngine on
On-Page Optimization | | webbutler13
rewritecond %{http_host} ^coolexample.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.)$ http://www.coolexample.com/$1 [r=301,nc]What is correct?0 -
Dealing with thin content/95% duplicate content - canonical vs 301 vs noindex
My client's got 14 physical locations around the country but has a webpage for each "service area" they operate in. They have a Croydon location. But a separate page for London, Croydon, Essex, Luton, Stevenage and many other places (areas near Croydon) that the Croydon location serves. Each of these pages is a near duplicate of the Croydon page with the word Croydon swapped for the area. I'm told this was a SEO tactic circa 2001. Obviously this is an issue. So the question - should I 301 redirect each of the links to the Croydon page? Or (what I believe to be the best answer) set a rel=canonical tag on the duplicate pages). Creating "real and meaningful content" on each page isn't quite an option, sorry!
On-Page Optimization | | JamesFx0 -
Discrepancy between SeoMoz vs Google Webmaster tools
SeoMoz reports over 70 4xx client server errors on my site, but Google Web Master Tools does not report any broken links. There are not any broken links on any of the pages that it is reporting. Could there be another reason for the 4xx errors besides broken links?
On-Page Optimization | | AndyHawkins0 -
Is it better to embed my longtail article or give it a separate url?
Within my e-commerce site I have jewelers who using uncommon techniques and maetrials. I have a few long tail type article ready to publish about these niche topics. My site navigation has each jeweler as a category with their often changing products within their category. I am thinking I would add an article to the artist-category content. But in the past, I have put "how to" or "what is" content in an article section of the site. This way I could link to it from several places. With the long tail in mind, would I be better off adding the article to the jeweler's category page? If I have a 2nd jeweler using this same technique, I am thinking I would rewrite the 1st article including different long tail phrases. Thank You for Helping- Handcrafter
On-Page Optimization | | stephenfishman0 -
External vs inline for CSS menu
Which is better for search engines: external or inline menus? And which language: CSS, Javascript, or both?
On-Page Optimization | | teatable0 -
Maintaining semi-related keyword groups
Ahoy! I'm working with a publishing site that has a series of primary topics for free content using a fairly wide keyword, under which we have cluster of associated keywords used in posts. For usability/simplicity some of the neccesarily broader topics have keywords within their cluster that aren't that closely related. We've had success with keeping related keywords and content grouped like this, but I'm not sure how much value to put on this. The issue is that we're writing a new free report (download) that is about "Y". "Y" is in topic category "X". X and Y are loosely related (it made more sense to put Y in X than anywhere else, and adwords/wonderwheel back this up), but there is an obvious disconnect where not everyone searching for X is interested in Y and vice versa. Since the new free report is predominantly about Y, should I go to the effort of using X keyword as a primary keyword since we've got a substantial amount of content in X topic where the two are related and the report will be housed? Or should I just focus on optomizing for Y and not care that it's in the X topic. My feeling is that we'd be better off just focusing on Y, and our general X topic page can continue to be the page focused on ranking for X, even if we normally aim to get an associated free report ranking for other topics' primary keyword. (Blast, that's a rather long and confusing explanation.)
On-Page Optimization | | Alex.Conde0