Forum Moderators: open
My question is this: When I am in my clients site, they have their main keywords linked to internal pages which works correctly. However, when reviewing the source code I noticed that the links say something like this:
<a href="keyword.html"> shouldn't it say <a href="www.domain.com/keyword.html"> as it appears on the internal url that you want to direct it to?
When I used the handy Sim Spider tool provided by WebmasterWorld it showed the link as [keyword.html...] and then couldn't read the page (for obvious reasons). Shouldn't it say the link is the internal page?
I hope someone understands what I am trying to get across. If you do can you tell me if this is a problem? I'm afraid the search engines are not reading the link correctly therefor not following it and indexing the page.
It's perfectly ok for a page to be linked in the manner you described. Browsers (and bots I'm pretty sure) understand something called a BASE url. That means it takes where you are right now and guesstimates where the link you're clicking on goes.
if you're at /index.html on your site, and you <a href> to "contents.html", when a visitor clicks they will be directed to /contents.html as expected.
Anytime you make a link that doesn't start with "http://" it's considered a relative link. That means relative to where you are right now.
I'm going to toss in that it might be nice to get used to linking some things like common images in the manner <img src="/images/pic1.gif"> with a leading slash. This just tells the browser to go all the way back to the root of the website and then look for "images" then "pic1.gif"
Oh, and just so you'll be totally content that it's ok to do this, just view source of www.google.com
