Absolute Versus Relative Linking in Web Sites
What is an absolute link? What is a relative link? Why should
you care which one you use? When it comes to how you set up the
links on your web site, it's important to use an absolute link
(which means that when you link to another page on your web site
you specify the complete URL in the link like
http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html). A relative link is when
you have an internal link and you only specify the page URL and
not the full URL in the link (for example, a relative link would
be when you only link to page1.html). I'll tell you my search
engine ranking horror story and exactly why you should use
absolute linking on your web site. I would hate for your web
site to suddenly lose all its search engine rankings just as I
did one day--it's not fun.
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. I fixed all of the relative linking on the site
and made sure all the internal links went to
www.mydomain.com/page.html and not page.html. After about two to
three weeks I finally got back my search engine rankings back.
As a result, I will never use relative linking again.
There's not actually any search engine rankings boost per se
when you use absolute versus relative links. However, when you
use absolutely links you make sure the search engines know which
"version" of your site to index.
You see, if someone links to your site using domain.com rather
than www.domain.com, the search engine will follow the link and
start crawling. If you use absolute links then the search engine
will crawl your site and only see the pages as
www.domain.com/page.html. If you use relative links the the
search engine could crawl your site as domain.com/page.html,
which is probably not what you want.
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. There are other reasons, as well.
What happens if you use relative links in your site? What
happens if someone decides to download an entire copy of your
website and put it up on their domain (trust me, it's happened
to me!)? If you use relative links, it would be easy to copy
your website and put it up on another domain. If you use
absolute links then it's much more difficult--the domain name
has to be removed or changed on all the pages of your site.
There are people out there who try to copy websites all the
time--and making it much more of a chore for them to copy and
change decreases your chances of the site being copied. Or, if
they do copy even one page of your site and put it up on their
domain name then they might not realize that your full URLs are
specified--checking your web stats might reveal the fact that
they copied your page's content--it's happened to me and I was
able to catch the culprit because of my own absolute
linking.
I realize that in certain web development environments and the
way web designers work on websites it's very difficult to use
absolute links. For example, many web developers and designers
set up a test area when they're working on a new web site or a
new revision of a site. As a result, they must use relative
links because the site 'wouldn't work' because it's temporarily
in another location. Some developers and designers use
clientname.theirdomain.com to test the website. In this case
when the site goes live the links should be changed to absolute
links.
In some cases it's difficult to set up absolute links. But,
because of the potential problems and rankings issues with using
relative linking, I'm not recommending that anyone use relative
linking. I've had major problems in the past with search engine
rankings because of relative linking--and I would hate for you
to have to suffer these rankings problems.