Relative V's absolute URL's

Relative absolute URL

[curly_clare]

Hi guys!

I've just had a thought and interested to hear peoples thoughts.

Does it make a difference to SERP's whether or not the urls to internal pages are relative or absolute?

i.e. if you had a page located at www.mydomain.com/products.htm and you wanted to link to a file called 'services' in the same directory - would it make any difference if the link path was '/services.htm' or www.mydomain.com/services.htm.

I realise that there is no need to use absolute paths to internal pages but it is apparent that some content managment systems require this.

Just a thought! take care all.

[Birdman]

Does it make a difference to SERP's whether or not the urls to internal pages are relative or absolute?

From my experience, no it does not matter. I never use absolute unless linking moving to https:// pages and all the pages get indexed fine.

[Receptional]

I don't think it matters either. Others may disagree.

[xbase234]

it my experience with dozens of websites, it does not matter.

[ggrot]

The question to ask is would it in some way improve the results of the search engines to make a distinction? In this case, I can't imagine it would - so ther eis very little chance any engine implements it.

[martinibuster]

While it doesn't help you algorithmically it is recommended you code using absolute url's if only to prevent some kind of "mistake" happening with the search bots. They're easier to follow.

[Jon_King]

GoogleGuy has said that too. Use absolute whenever possible.

[dataguy]

I took over a web site 2 months ago that had 86,000 listings in Google, and top 3 listings in all its industry-specific keywords. I was astonished at how successful the former webmaster had been at promoting the web site. You guess it, every link had been coded as an absolute address.

Incidentally, the domain name had to be changed on the web site, and it took 6 hours of an automated search-and-replace operation to change the URL's on all the pages.

The domain name was three keywords separated by hyphens... not sure if this strategy is as effective as it used to be, but I wasn't about to change it...

[Visit Thailand]

I also prefer absolute urls - no idea whether it makes any difference but prefer them all the same.

[graywolf]

I get much better results with abolute vs relative, although I've only compared results with 4 new websites. The results may even out if the website has a long lifespan.