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absolute urls vs relative urls

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Chris Hope

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Apr 26, 2004, 2:59:52 AM4/26/04
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Is it better to use full absolute urls for all links in your site for seo
purposes than relative ones? Or does it make no difference?

eg a href="http://www.domain.com/foo.html"
or a href="foo.html"

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Chris Hope
The Electric Toolbox - http://www.electrictoolbox.com/

Will Spencer

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Apr 26, 2004, 3:10:18 AM4/26/04
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On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 18:59:52 +1200, Chris Hope wrote:

> Is it better to use full absolute urls for all links in your site for seo
> purposes than relative ones? Or does it make no difference?
>
> eg a href="http://www.domain.com/foo.html"
> or a href="foo.html"

I strongly believe that it does not make a difference.

However, a month or so ago, a fairly bright person (I do not recall whom)
posted strongly supporting the exactly opposite conclusion.


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Will
Webmaster: http://www.internet-search-engines-faq.com

John Dingley

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Apr 26, 2004, 4:43:08 AM4/26/04
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"Will Spencer" <will.s...@internet-search-engines-faq.com> wrote in
message
news:pan.2004.04.26....@internet-search-engines-faq.com...
As far as SEO goes I don't think it makes any difference. However, there are
other reasomns why using a href="foo.html" in your example is better, one of
which is the portability of your site. If for example, you want to change
domains all absolute urls would need editing whereas the other doesn't


Big Bill

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Apr 26, 2004, 1:08:52 PM4/26/04
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Plus there are considerations like server space, bandwidth usage,
download time, yada-yada....

BB

PeterMcC

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Apr 26, 2004, 2:01:23 PM4/26/04
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Will Spencer wrote in
<pan.2004.04.26....@internet-search-engines-faq.com>

> On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 18:59:52 +1200, Chris Hope wrote:
>
>> Is it better to use full absolute urls for all links in your site
>> for seo purposes than relative ones? Or does it make no difference?
>>
>> eg a href="http://www.domain.com/foo.html"
>> or a href="foo.html"
>
> I strongly believe that it does not make a difference.
>
> However, a month or so ago, a fairly bright person (I do not recall
> whom) posted strongly supporting the exactly opposite conclusion.

In the absence of the fairly bright person owning up, I'll mention that
there seems to be a benefit to absolute URLs when the site's domain name has
SE readable keywords.

The keywords get repeated in every local URL as per:
http://www.hotel-ireland.com/ (1st for "Hotel Ireland" and "Ireland hotel"
in Google)

Have a look at the source for the Search by County options - though I can't
understand why they don't do the same thing in the sidebar menu. Perhaps
they're satisfied with number 1?


--
PeterMcC
If you feel that any of the above is incorrect,
inappropriate or offensive in any way,
please ignore it and accept my apologies.

John Dingley

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Apr 26, 2004, 2:17:40 PM4/26/04
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I think the spider must "expand" any url anyway to navigate as you cannot
for example use "../foo.html" as a valid url it always gets translated to a
real url.

The key question is: does the spider exclude url text and some separate
process performs the site navigation or does the spider read the text urls
and see keywords within them.

Does anyone really know? Can't think of a way to test it - because google
displays it as full url either way when it displays results.

"PeterMcC" <pe...@mccourt.org.uk> wrote in message
news:Obcjc.36615$Y%6.49...@wards.force9.net...

BH

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Apr 26, 2004, 4:11:10 PM4/26/04
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In message
<pan.2004.04.26....@internet-search-engines-faq.com>, Will
Spencer <will.s...@internet-search-engines-faq.com> writes

>> Is it better to use full absolute urls for all links in your site for seo
>> purposes than relative ones? Or does it make no difference?
>>
>> eg a href="http://www.domain.com/foo.html"
>> or a href="foo.html"
>
>I strongly believe that it does not make a difference.
>
>However, a month or so ago, a fairly bright person (I do not recall
>whom) posted strongly supporting the exactly opposite conclusion.


I wonder if relative urls help the spider to go deeper as it has less
reading to do or could it be the other way round and slow the spider
down as it has to convert the relative urls to absolute urls to find
its way

Barrie,
--
BH

PeterMcC

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Apr 26, 2004, 4:36:24 PM4/26/04
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John A. wrote in
<45lq80tnorenj1sc4...@4ax.com>

> On Mon, 26 Apr 2004 19:17:40 +0100, "John Dingley"
> <john@!justlottery!.com> wrote:
>
>> I think the spider must "expand" any url anyway to navigate as you
>> cannot for example use "../foo.html" as a valid url it always gets
>> translated to a real url.
>>
>> The key question is: does the spider exclude url text and some
>> separate process performs the site navigation or does the spider
>> read the text urls and see keywords within them.
>>
>> Does anyone really know? Can't think of a way to test it - because
>> google displays it as full url either way when it displays results.
>

> And it highlights search terms in the URLs whether they were in the
> relative link code or not.

And, to add one more imponderable, does anyone know whether the terms in the
URL are highlighted because Google has seen them in there - as they are now
for unhyphenated URLs as well as hyphenated - or because the page formatting
for the results includes a highlighting procedure that is independent of
Google's search/rank algo?

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