short URL format in source: good practice or missed opportunity?

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short URL format in source: good practice or missed opportunity?

tomajacar

10:38 am on Feb 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

Hi,

I was looking at the source of my site (www.mysite.com) the other day, and how my links were appearing, and I realized that most links were in a short format as follow:
<a href="/directory.htm" class="content_link"> instead of href="http://www.mysite.com/directory.htm"
I can tell that these pages are indexed by all 3 major search engines, but I am still wondering whether that's a good practice, or a handicap as far as SEO is concerned?
Thanks for your help

tomajacar

10:43 am on Feb 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

someone just tapped on my shoulder and told me it's called a relative URL...

caveman

4:53 pm on Feb 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

Yes, it is. It is useful in dev because it allows the developer to more easily click around a "site" on the dev server (which for many small site owners is their own computer). The downside is that it's not generally considered best practice because it allows for the possibility that SE's may become confused when crawling a site. That applies mainly though to sites that are sloppily put together.

Plus, there is a way to help ensure the bots know where they are and where they are going. It's call the Base tag. Just add this tag to the head section of your page and in so doing, you are specifying a 'base url' for all the links on that page, e.g.:

Receptional Andy

4:54 pm on Feb 5, 2008 (gmt 0)

Full URLs can be useful against some types of site scrapers too.

tomajacar

12:19 am on Feb 8, 2008 (gmt 0)

thanks
I'll go for the base tag. it seems to be a quick win