Internal Linking - Better to Use Absolute or Relative Links?

[gouri]

I was doing a search on the internet about if it is best to use absolute or relative links for internal links on a website and I found some experienced SEOs saying that absolute links are the best because they help to associate a page on a website with certain anchor text and help in the rankings, and I also found some experienced SEOs saying that using relative links is ok because search engines convert them to absolute links on their own.

Since I found a good number of SEOs with differing opinions regarding this, I wanted to ask the forum members what they would recommend? I have read pretty convincing arguments for both sides so I think it would be good to hear from members who may have tried both methods and see if one of the ways was more helpful in the rankings than the other?

Thanks.

[lexipixel]

anchor links:

Relative (within same document)
<a href="#this">This</a>
<a href="#that">That</a>

Root relative (within any document)
<a href="/dir/page.htm#this">This</a>
<a href="/dir/page.htm#that">That</a>

Absolute (within any document)
<a href="http://www.example.com/dir/page.htm#this">This</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com/dir/page.htm#that">That</a>

...and one more!

Directory Relative (within any document in same directory)
<a href="page.htm#this">This</a>
<a href="page.htm#that">That</a>

[iambic9]

I often use a fifth (dodgy?) link in the form of:

//images.example.co.uk/image.jpg

I really don't know whether this is strictly OK to do or even how you would define this practice, (protocol relative?) but it's worked for the last couple of years. I use it when connecting to external files / scripts that may or may not be on a secure connection.

Example: I host many images on a separate privately owned domain for our commerce site, when the user switches into secure areas images automatically get called with https://

I've never had any issues with ranking (We're always first / second for targeted keywords) (In fact I'd actually rather not rank for images in google – for obvious off topic reasons).

Matt.

[ergophobe]

Nobody has mentioned the consequences of absolute/relative in RSS feeds and so forth.

It seems to me that relative links are the usual reason images and such go missing in RSS feeds and if someone scrapes your RSS feed, a relative link does not point back to your site and does not pass any link juice.

[futureX]

As per the above post I always use root relative links when designing implementing sites themselves as it makes it easier for me if changing over domains. However if I am writing content that will go into an RSS feed or could be syndicated I'll use absolute links.

Further to the underscore vs. dashes, I have and always will use underscore as not only does it look better it (imo) is better.

[tedster]

In 2003 it was easy to notice that keywords in the URLs at DMOZ (they use underscores) had ZERO findability through Google. At that time, the examples were many. However DMOZ has since changed their breadcrumb structure to replace the underscores with spaces and that changed the in-your-face examples.

Then in 2005 Matt Cutts confirmed that dashes were superior [mattcutts.com]. The challenge is this: searches for terms like [FTP_BINARY] REQUIRE that the underscore be treated as a character and not as a word separator.

Google went to work and improved things for the underscore [mattcutts.com] - but they still did not create true parity. To see some evidence, do a Google search for only the underscore character. There are over 1 billion results. Then do a search for the dash character, and there are no results at all.

The difference in ranking influence today is small enough that there's no reason to change existing URLs, but there still is a small edge for the dash if you are creating a new URL.

Until 2003, I was routinely using the underscore as a keyword separator in the URL, but the evidence was too strong, and I switched. No one NEEDS to switch - the ranking advantage is not even as big as have a faster page load than your competition does. But it is one small advantage, nevertheless.