When do I need a BASE meta tag?

base meta needed for relative links problem?

[imran]

We have a postnuke site. Postnuke uses a combination of some relative links (i.e. no initial slash), and some absolute (initial slash).

We also have some other content. So, we initially put a redirect (meta refresh=0;url type) from the / folder to the /postnuke/html folder, which is where our postnuke content lived.

In browsers, everything worked fine. But the google cache had all the relative links wrong - the stylesheet went missing as well as most of the graphics.

We've just changed that to an 'Apache' redirect from / to /postnuke/html. However, google has yet to re-index our homepage, so we can't see if that has fixed the problem.

Another solution might be to put in a 'BASE' meta tag to hardcode the full URI of the homepage. Will that be necessary to keep google happy?

I can post the URL in a subsequent message if it helps to see the site in question.

Why can't we just move the postnuke content to /? Because we have lots of other non-postnuke content, and we don't want lots of subfolders off of / , just a single postnuke folder where all the postnuke content lives.

Thanks
Imran

[andreasfriedrich]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com] imran.

Be sure to read Marcia`s WebmasterWorld Welcome and Guide to the Basics [webmasterworld.com] post.

This thread explains about Path Information - The Base Element - <base href="http://www.domain.com/"> [webmasterworld.com].

HTH Andreas

[imran]

Thanks Andreas...

Actually I understand what the BASE tag does, and I know that it's not needed for normal browsers on my site, but I wonder if it would help Google, which is not getting the base URI correct after a 'META REFRESH'.

We have changed the meta refresh to an apache page redirect, but Google has yet to reindex, so I'm trying to find some advance advice of whether this will fix things.