Forum Moderators: open
Just a quick question:
Regarding google, is this the same url?(A tag, href=):
http://www.mysite.com/images/mypic.jpg
/images/mypic.jpg
Do they get spidered/indexed/count for PR/whatever google the same?
Thanks!
It is a mistake where people use /index.html or /index.php or similar because google treat
www.yoursite.com/ and
www.yoursite.com/index.html
DIFFERENTLY.
I'd wait for more than one opinion before changing your internal links. I'm hardly an expert but I've always heard that while Google is certainly able to append a domain name to a link, it doesn't treat relative and absolute links the same. I'm not saying I am sure about this. But one or two voices shouldn't change your mind one way or the other.
I had great trouble getting a bunch of pages linked via relative URLs into the database so I switched them to absolutes and got them in. But that was well over a year ago. Also, I've never found "/" to be treated differently to "/index.html" provided that the file named is the default. These four references are treated equally on 8 of my sites:
domain
domain/index.html
www.domain
www.domain/index.html
same PR, same backlinks, same everything. So I question that assumption as well.
I have always use / for homepage.
It is a mistake where people use /index.html or /index.php or similar because google treatwww.yoursite.com/ and
www.yoursite.com/index.htmlDIFFERENTLY
Google distinguishes between these pages if they have different content. However, Google merges these pages (i.e. add back links and PR; show only one page in the SERPS) if they are identical.
Google distinguishes between these pages if they have different content. However, Google merges these pages (i.e. add back links and PR; show only one page in the SERPS) if they are identical.
Yes I thought this as well.
However some months after the site was launched and PR was gained, it started around August, Sep time to show a greybar on the /, but index was ok.
So I changed all the internal links to / and soon after the grey bar had gone and / was back to showing PR.
I also assumed that / & index would be treated the same, and for a while that certainly was the case until the greybar appeared on the /
/iNdEx.html, /index.shtml, /index.php and /default.asp are still requested, and will be merged with / only if identical.
when I enter http:/*www.mydomain.com it spiders the site but the relative links it lists don't work. It lists the links leaving the page as http:/*directory/filename.htm/ (which naturally wouldn't work)
When I type in http:/*www.mydomain.com/ the sim spider works perfectly. It lists the links leaving the page as http:/*www.mydomain.com/directory/filename.htm
I am curious if Googlebot is behaving similarly. I am also curious if this is standard spider behaviour or something indigenous to my site. I was looking at this because no search engine has checked out my new pages out since mid december. Any ideas?
So even though we should handle this correctly, I lean toward using absolute links just to be safe.
Personally, I lean toward absolute links
Yeah, that's what I use. But if you represent Google, why do you discourse like Plato, and hint like Nostradamus?
This is why these boards are losing their influence.
Could we have one, simple, statement of fact?
Or is this a mere PR exercise: admittedly one of the very highest quality?
Absolute or relative - simple question!
I'm with glengara, absolute addresses and a dedicated IP. It wasn't so long ago that Google would occasionally list both www.example.com and example.com in the SERPs. The PR was often split between them.
It sounds to me as if GoogleGuy thinks these sorts of problems are resolved and is awaiting feedback to the contrary. He's also making it very clear how to avoid them.
1. Absolute (http://blah...)
2. Root Relative (/whatever/file.htm)
3. Document Relative (../whatever/file.htm)
It used to be that Google had an issue with no 2 I believe, because if someone tried to view the cache on a document with a linked CSS file or images in format no.2 then the file would attempt to be served from the Google server. As far as I can tell this seems to have been fixed. Perhpas the BASE HREF tag on their cache has been added recently?
Yeah Chico_Loco, I was talking about differences between your
1. Absolute (http://blah...)
and
2. Root Relative (/whatever/file.htm)
Yeah Powdork, I'm gonna do that too, since I just changed some links from #1 to #2. I'll just wait and see...
With absolute links - apart from an absolutely unambiguous link to a page - you can also move pages from one folder to another without messing up your links. You can also download it to edit and it still has functionality. I use absolutes even on image files for this reason.
The only possible downside is a slight increase in the file size of your pages - but when you think about it, this effect is negligible unless you have an unusually large number of links on a page.
Powdork, can you recommend a sim spider? I'd like to try one on a site I can't seem to get deepcrawled by Google.
SearchEngineWorld has one
[searchengineworld.com...]
(this link won't work, see message #28)
I hope that's ok to give since its linked from the homepage here.
absolute links have less potential for getting messed up. Even though it shouldn't make a difference, I recommend absolute links.That's an unusually clear statement. How do we know you're the real GoogleGuy?;)
[edited by: Powdork at 11:00 pm (utc) on Jan. 2, 2004]
Googlebot seems to follow those links to new content faster when I use absolute links.
Of course, the timing may have just been right when I changed to absolute links on my "what's new" page, so who knows.
I now stick with absolute in most cases, just because I *know* that it works.
This is a perfectly valid statement. With software you never know :-)
