What is Best for Search Engines, Absolute or Relative URLs

[engine]

This question still comes up these days, so it's a useful reminder.

What's the difference between absolute and relative URLs, and how a search engine crawls and indexes.

[robzilla]

TLDW: there is no difference, they are treated equally because they translate to the same URL.

[tangor]

Better question which is best for the coder?

Relative all the way!

[lucy24]

which is best for the coder

I would have said, which is best for the site.

The choice is really between href="/path-from-root" and href="path-from-right-here".

It is very very unlikely that a full URL beginning in http is necessary or appropriate (and can sometimes break things like image display if there's an https mismatch). And the chances are pretty close to zero that href="../../etcetera" is ever, ever appropriate for a live* website.

* “Live” specified because I do use ../../ when previewing a new page locally, as it works whether or not I’m running MAMP.

[brotherhood of LAN]

Always preferred relative simply because it's shorter and if you ever moved domain for whatever reason, the links won't matter.

I mean relative in the sense of beginning with a /, relative to the domain!

Guess it gets confusing when relative could mean "../" etc.

[lucy24]

relative could mean "../" etc.

And it could also mean "blahblah" with no leading slash--suitable for when you have a group of files that will always work as a package, like
/directory/
/directory/specificstyles.css
/directory/images/all-the-names-here

You might conceivably move the whole package to a different directory, but the immediate links will always keep the same relationship to each other.

[brotherhood of LAN]

suitable for when you have a group of files that will always work as a package, like

There's always baseurl to remove any problems either/or

[developer.mozilla.org...]

[aristotle]

mean relative in the sense of beginning with a /, relative to the domain!

When I created my first site in 2004, the guide I used didn't show a slash, so I didn't either. Thus:

<a href="page1.html">Page 1</a>
<a href="page2.html">Page 2</a>
etc

But it worked anyway, and still does, since I've never changed it.

[lucy24]

I hope that in the intervening 17 years you have learned what the leading slash means, and under what circumstances its presence or absence would make a difference.

[aristotle]

Well Lucy I know more now than I did then, but probably not as much as you :)