Root directory read as ../ and not from the root /

[Sugihono Budiman]

I am new to GSC. I recently ran the crawler and encounter the site not to have any xml links. Hence the links are valid and I can see on all browsers chrome, ff and ie but GSC would not generate the link. I also ran xenu1 and found the link appear to be broken. I develop the page in .net visual studio 2013 and in windows I am allowed to use ../ as root directory. So lets says I have a root folder and subfolder called folder1. So in the code I am using <a href="../folder1/test.aspx"></a>. Xenu showing www.domain.com/../folder1/test.aspx. Why is this happening? Are these application too old and can't understand .net?

[webado]

Well actually it's what happens with this type of navigation when any robot crawls. A browser keeps track of the current path and figures that the ./ means  current directory while ../ is the parent directory (i.e. up one level). But if you use ../ and the base href does not indicate correctly what the full path is with then the robot is lost.

I'd have to see the page to figure out what's going on. But in general it's best to avoid such relative urls that leave room for ambiguities.

If you mean your url is relative to the root then start it with the / : <a href="/folder1/test.aspx">blah</a> .This gets expanded to be  http://example.com/folder1/test.aspx