Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
The question is: which way would be better to link from your internal pages to other pages from the same website - full URL (URI) or just partial?
For example, if I link from page1.html to page3.html, should I use the whole URL or just "page3.html"
All this is as far SEO is conserned, not from technical point of view - I know you can avoid mistakes if you use the whole URL etc., but would you gain more in the SERPs if you use full links? Or would Google count it as a link out?
Basicaly tedster is correct, however that technical disclaimer covers a lot of ground ;-).
Maybe you'll find some results of doing such a test. I really don't know.
You still will not have a definative answer because you really won't have all of the possible variables taken into consideration or controlled for.
Some of the biggest such variables would be site configuration issues and external links to the pages that have your test links in them etc.
That is the reason that tedster qualified his answer.
I expanded the qualification to possible external issues of the same type only this time on the search engines data handling system.
Is there an issue when it comes to links, yes, you betcha. I would say that such issues are at the core of most threads in this forum.
A hint for anyone droping by "that which is fully specified" will not leave any room for several issues to progress into "site" ranking problems.
The "site" ranking problems however are seldom related directly to the form of the link itself, but to factors that having certain forms of links allow to happen.
For such effects I refer the OP to the sticky post at the top of this forum and to all threads mentioned in that post. The OP should be able to then understand the assumption tedster made and would also have the answer to the post that started this thread.
[edited by: theBear at 11:35 pm (utc) on Jan. 13, 2007]
I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there's less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused.
It is not only the webmaster's mistakes, but the mistakes of search engine bots that can be damaging from a SEO standpoint.
[edited by: StickyNote at 1:51 am (utc) on Jan. 14, 2007]
I could not discern a difference in Google ranking between full URL, full path, page relative and base relative. At least when I didn't screw up the links.
Yeah, that test showed me how easy it is to screw things up when you don't go with at least a full path. I screwed up several page relative and base relative links when I did block copies to files in other directories.
If you are really anal about testing, then go ahead and use relative. I like full URL or at least full path.
Full URL also provides several other technical safeguards, but you didn't want to hear about those.
A bit dated perhaps, but a quote from the Google unofficial spokesperson:
He also said that, if you aren't having problems with your relative links being crawled, not to worry about it.
Likewise put your business or domain name all over the text.
