Links on my homepage...

Should they include my full url?

[HyperGeek]

I use the <BASE HREF="http://www.widgetymania.com"> tag.

When I link to another part of my site, should I make the HREF="http://www.widgetymania.com/blue-widgets.html"?

They currently read HREF="/blue-widgets.html" because of the BASE URL.

Even better yet, what difference does it make if any?

[skipfactor]

Absolute URLs are the way to go. In addition to Brett's points in the link below, I noticed when I changed to an absolute, it seemed to coax Freshbot into digging deeper, but this could have been a coincidence:

[searchengineworld.com...]

[topr8]

i thought that if you use base then the url's on the page are relative to the base.

therefore...

>>When I link to another part of my site, should I make the HREF="http://www.widgetymania.com/ blue-widgets.html"?

>>They currently read HREF="/blue-widgets.html" because of the BASE URL.

a link to [widgetymania.com...] blue-widgets.html

should be ... <a href="blue-widgets.html"> without the forward slash.

regarding the point about the google cache i don't know and haven't tried.

[HyperGeek]

a link to [widgetymania.com...] blue-widgets.html

should be ... <a href="blue-widgets.html"> without the forward slash.

There's an issue with some older NS browsers when you don't begin a relative link to an image or page with a forward-slash.

Besides, if a base url includes the ending forward slash, it's just ignored in most cases, requiring relative links to begin with that forward slash.

At least this is my experience with using a base url.

[topr8]

thanks HG i didn't know about the legacy issue

[seoRank]

From the SE, bookmark, print, cache and usage point of view, as per Brett, absolute URL's may work better.

However, the purpose of base href code was to make the HTML more portable between servers, domain and directories and also to make the HTML size light. If this is not the reason you are using base href in the first place, stick to absolute URLs

[tkteo]

The book "Google Hacks" also recommends "raw" URIs, which I take to mean absolute URIs.

[HyperGeek]

Skipfactor was dead-on with his referral, so I'm going to post it again - [searchengineworld.com...]

I agree with Brett wholeheartedly, it is not a hassle to set up your links like this and unless you decide to change your domain name, there are no complications that can be caused by this once your are on your domain hosted server.

YOU CAN ALSO HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO!

By applying a BASE locator, you can still shorten the length of your code because it allows you to define relative sources for images. As I stated earlier, some images would not show up at all if the source path to it was not fully defined.

I'm also going to experiment with relative urls to see how we can use them effectively in regards to SEO. It may help to get more important pages indexed faster if the links leading to them are absolute, while links to other pages are relative.

Very interested to see if this does anything.

[skipfactor]

seoRank

the purpose of base href code was...to make the HTML size light.

I guess that's true, but the cost is negligible, especially if you keep your pages small anyway.

It may not make a difference, but I'd rather remind the bots of my physical home address everytime they follow a link, especially if one has a keyword-rich domain. ;)

[eaden]

I would reccomend against the BASE tag. Some widly used software by Novel seems to ignore it ( and some spiders ). Use a /page.html type link ( where /page.html = site.com/page.html )