Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Set base-href to subfolders - problems?
-
A customer is using the <base>-tag in an odd way:
<base href="http://domain.com/1.0.0/1/1/">
My own theory is that the subfolders are added as the root because of revision control.
CSS, images and internal links are used like this:
I ran a test with Xenu Link Sleuth and found many broken links on the site, but I can't say if it is due to the base-tag.
I have read that the base-tag may cause problems in some browsers, but is this usage of base-tag bad in some SEO-perspective? I have a lot of problems with this customer and I want to know if the base-tag is a part of it.
-
Hi Highland!
I know that relative URLs is anything but good, especially when you also use URL rewrite.
The only question is how Google will react to this?
Thanks for your answer!
-
Hi Cyrus and thanks for your answer!
The client is using the base tag on all pages on the site, but with different URLs. For example:
Root page: <base href="http://domain.com/1.0.1.0/2/1/">
Subpage:
<base href="http://domain.com/1.0.1.0/5/1/"> OR
<base href="http://domain.com/1.0.1.0/13/1/">Productpage:
<base href="http://domain.com/1.0.1.0/14/1/">As you can se they are using a lot of different base locations and unfortunately we are unable to change the base URL and test.
We have problems with both broken links and rankings. Whenever a new version of the system is created, all base URLs will be changed. This may mean that old links are still there and will be broken.
What do you think Cyrus, can this hurt us from a SEO perspective? It must be confusing for Google with all the strange base URLs?
I think the best would be to rebuild the structure and remove the base tag!
-
Most of the time you don't need to specify a base URL. The browser already knows this location. In some situations defining a base is helpful, such as mirrored sites when the URL used is not the same URL that is needed to resolve files.
Is your clients using a universal base tag that is the same across the entire site? I can't tell from the question, but this is a common situation that could potentially cause problems.
There's nothing inherently wrong with using a base tag. Most of the time, if you use it, you simply want to set it to the URL of the current page.That said, to avoid complications, the only time you really want to use the Base tag is when relative URLs wouldn't work without it.
You might want to test how the links on your site resolve and see if removing or modifying the base tag helps clear up your broken links.
-
Those are some sloppy URLs. I especially advise people to avoid the problems of relative paths in ANY URL. And, yes, <base> probably isn't helping.
Links starting with / are fine. That's the root of your site. Anything using "../" should be nixed and use a fixed path. And never, ever use "./".
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Sitemap use for very large forum-based community site
I work on a very large site with two main types of content, static landing pages for products, and a forum & blogs (user created) under each product. Site has maybe 500k - 1 million pages. We do not have a sitemap at this time.
Technical SEO | | CommManager
Currently our SEO discoverability in general is good, Google is indexing new forum threads within 1-5 days roughly. Some of the "static" landing pages for our smaller, less visited products however do not have great SEO.
Question is, could our SEO be improved by creating a sitemap, and if so, how could it be implemented? I see a few ways to go about it: Sitemap includes "static" product category landing pages only - i.e., the product home pages, the forum landing pages, and blog list pages. This would probably end up being 100-200 URLs. Sitemap contains the above but is also dynamically updated with new threads & blog posts. Option 2 seems like it would mean the sitemap is unmanageably long (hundreds of thousands of forum URLs). Would a crawler even parse something that size? Or with Option 1, could it cause our organically ranked pages to change ranking due to Google re-prioritizing the pages within the sitemap?
Not a lot of information out there on this topic, appreciate any input. Thanks in advance.0 -
does <base> in html affect seo?
hey, just wanna know does <base> in head of website affect SEO? and if it's a yes, how?
Technical SEO | | m17001 -
Google has deindexed a page it thinks is set to 'noindex', but is in fact still set to 'index'
A page on our WordPress powered website has had an error message thrown up in GSC to say it is included in the sitemap but set to 'noindex'. The page has also been removed from Google's search results. Page is https://www.onlinemortgageadvisor.co.uk/bad-credit-mortgages/how-to-get-a-mortgage-with-bad-credit/ Looking at the page code, plus using Screaming Frog and Ahrefs crawlers, the page is very clearly still set to 'index'. The SEO plugin we use has not been changed to 'noindex' the page. I have asked for it to be reindexed via GSC but I'm concerned why Google thinks this page was asked to be noindexed. Can anyone help with this one? Has anyone seen this before, been hit with this recently, got any advice...?
Technical SEO | | d.bird0 -
Problems with WooCommerce Product Attribute Filter URL's
I am running a WordPress/WooCommerce site for a client, and Moz is picking up some issues with URL's generated from WooCommerce product attribute filters. For example: ..co.uk/womens-prescription-glasses/?filter_gender=mens&filter_style=full-rim&filter_shape=oval How do I get Google to ignore these filters?
Technical SEO | | SushiUK
I am running Yoast Premium, but not sure if this can solve the issue? Product categories are canonicalised to the root category URL. Any suggestions very gratefully appreciated. Thanks Bob0 -
Yoast SEO. After set up 404 error pages
Hello all, Something strange happened with my blog site. I recently signed to MOZ tools. Initially everything was fine, but during my last crawl I got loads of 404
Technical SEO | | A_Fotografy
pages. Few days ago I was tweaking some settings in SEO plugin according to this post https://moz.com/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success What I noticed was that 404 pages were coming from my blog posts, but for
some reason category was missing in those posts. For example this link is 404
https://a-fotografy.co.uk/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie The one with category is https://a-fotografy.co.uk/wedding-pictures/inchcolm-island-wedding-photography-bailie/ So basically for some reason category was missing. Please let me know how can I fix this instead of doing hundreds of
redirects now. Thank you,
Regards,
Armands0 -
Do knowledge base plugins on a subdomain have seo benefit?
Hi SEO Moz, We want to use a knowledge base plugin (cheaper & faster than building it ourselves) where we can have Q&As for our website. We want this to help with our SEO by adding in our keyterms that we want to rank for. We've looked into TenderApp & Get Satisfaction which look like good solutions - however, as they're both on a sub-domain do we get any seo benefit from this? When people link to our knowledge base, will this help our website at all - or is the benefit going to go to TenderApp/Get Satisfaction? For instance - Our website URL is http://widget.products.com The KB URL is http://widgetsupport.products.com If the above plugin is not a good solution, is there anything else that is better? Any help will be greatly appreciated!! Thanks.
Technical SEO | | qdigi0 -
Best geotargeting strategy: Subdomains or subfolders or country specific domain
How have the relatively recent changes in how G perceives subdomains changed the best route to onsite geotargeting i.e. not building out new country specific sites on country specific and hosted domains and instead developing sub-domains or sub-folders and geo-targeting those via webmaster tools ? In other words, given the recent change in G perception, are sub-domains now a better option than a sub-folder or is there not much in it ? Also if client has a .co.uk and they want to geo-target say France, is the sub-domain/sub-folder route still an option or is the .co.uk still too UK specific, and these options would only work using a .com ? In other words can sites on country specific domains (.co.uk , .fr, .de etc etc) use sub-folders or domains to geo-target other countries or do they have no option other than to develop new country specific (domains/hosting/language) websites ? Any thoughts regarding current best practice in this regard much appreciated. I have seen last Febs WBF which covers geotargeting in depth but the way google perceives subdomains has changed since then Many Thanks Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
How to move my blog from subdomain to subfolder?
Not an unusual situation, I have a blog on blog.domain.com it has quite a few blog postings. The platform is old and will be scrapped, but the blog content itself is going to be moved to domain.com/blog. The current process is we are manually listing all linked to/content pages and we are going to 301 redirect them to their counterparts on the new blog. This is going to be a tedious process. A) Is there any way to automate the moving of the blog? B) What is the best way to do the massive 301 redirect, php headers, .htaccess? Should we move the individual pages with redirects, or redirect the domain in the .htaccess (this will be very difficult to match all the titles and file structure)?
Technical SEO | | MarloSchneider0