Absolute vs relative urls internal linking

It’s a good question, I’m not sure about the seo implications, it seems a bit weird that a search engine would care as long as they can find the page but I have noticed that some spiders seem to get confused with relative links so I have changed all mine to absolute just to be on the safe side. Basically I was getting a lot of 404 errors in my weblog so figured better safe than sorry.

@harold 207419 wrote:

I have been reading about the SEO influence of the choice between absolute and relative urls for internal linking.

Some say it does not make a difference and that search engines (also Google) don’t care if you use absolute or relative urls. Others say that it does make a difference and that it is better to use absolute urls.

My obvious question is now whether it does matter or not.

On a certain website with a Joomla backend, I’m having trouble implementing absolute urls. That is why I want to know if I can just as well use relative urls or that I should find a solution which would allow me to implement absolute urls.

Many thanks

Regarding weblinks I am interpreting your description a few ways..

When you say relative and absolute, do you mean relative as in “../main/blah.htm”
or “/main/blah.htm”

And absolute as in “/main/blah.htm” or “domain.com/main/blah.htm”

I am thinking you mean relative “/main/blah.htm” and absolute as “domain.com/main/blah.htm” but I have a feeling I may be wrong..

Just in case this may make a difference to the answer from the SEO guys.

Another question (for someone who isn’t as savvy on SE bots) – do the search engines crawl your raw files or do they crawl the source code? Coz theoretically, if they are crawling the source code and not your raw files it shouldn’t make a difference because they would see the same regardless. JMO.

Renee
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As far as i understand it the search engines read exactly the same as you read on a webpage. To be more exact if you go to a webpage and click on view source then that is what the spider sees. This is why javascript menus can be a bit dodgy because they don’t show up, they only get listed as a javascript in the source, i.e the links in the menu are not visible to the bot.

The way I look at it it doesn’t do any harm to include the http references with the potentially small benefit that if an automated scraper nicks anything from your page it may at least retain your links. Not sure if that’s anything major but little harm IMO.

I remember a Matt Cutts video where he exactly said that you should use absolute URLs if possible.

@smartface 207570 wrote:

I remember a Matt Cutts video where he exactly said that you should use absolute URLs if possible.

That’s all well and good but a lot of cms’s like MODx and I guess WordPress won’t let you specify absolute url links for internal links I don’t think. The best you can do is make the paths absolute as regards the webserver, i.e specifying /images/pic1.gif instead of something like ../../images/pic1.gif but even that needs a bit of hacking.

@heimdall 207630 wrote:

That’s all well and good but a lot of cms’s like MODx and I guess WordPress won’t let you specify absolute url links for internal links I don’t think.

WordPress will let you ” title=”” class=”bbcode_smiley” />

@smartface 207570 wrote:

I remember a Matt Cutts video where he exactly said that you should use absolute URLs if possible.

this was a suggestion for developers as using absolute will cause less issues in the search engines as templates are moved around and used. either is fine for SEO and will not influence either way. using absolute is an SEO and development style guide requirement I have for all of my clients … just good common sense to use if at all possible within your app.

~ scott polk