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
-
SEO Problems with Loading to a Subfolder?
A client has a single page app website that shows https://example.com/example when you visit https://example.com . I don't think this is a redirect; I think it's a URL rewrite. My questions: Is this setup common with single page apps? What are the SEO benefits or drawbacks of having a domain's homepage load, rewrite, or redirect to a subfolder?
Technical SEO | | Kevin_P0 -
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 -
Indexation and visibility problem
Hi I am working on a website (usarrestsearch org) for 6 months. I wrote about 100 pages full of good content. for some reason I see only 75% of the pages indexed in GWT. and Im having problems with SERP positions not rising. I suspect that it might be connected to the structure of the site. will appreciate any help thanks
Technical SEO | | holdportals0 -
Problem with Wordpress RSS feed and Feedburner
Just discovered a problem with my company site's RSS feed. I'm a bit embarrassed to ask, but I thought someone in the community might have encountered this -- and I cannot figure it out for the life of me! We had redirected our Wordpress feed to Feedburner. We publish at least once per week, but no posts after March 18 are in the feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheClineGroup The standard (Wordpress) RSS feed page does not load: http://theclinegroup.com/feed/ Of course, I deactivated all plug-ins to see if one of them was the issue, but the problem(s) still existed. Thanks so much for any assistance!
Technical SEO | | SamuelScott0 -
Problem of possible duplicate title tag and description. Help me!
Hi everybody, I'm optimizing this huge website that has a lot of identical categories for differente locations. I'm trying to find a smart way to write title and description for these categories, changing the location as a variable on the title and description phrase. Here some examples: Title: Attractions in [CITY]. Sightseeings, monuments and museums in [CITY]. Description: Find travel ideas and suggestions for [CITY]. On [NAME OF THE WEBSITE] you can find a lot of attractions, monuments and sightseeing off the beaten path in [CITY]. Changing only the name of the CITY on these Titles and Descriptions, am I running the risk of duplicate title and description? Thanks in advance for your help!
Technical SEO | | OptimizedGroup0 -
Auto genrated content problem?
Hi all, I operate a Dutch website (sneeuwsporter.nl), the website is a a database of European ski resorts and accommodations (hotels, chalets etc). We launched about a month ago with a database of about 1700+ accommodations. Of every accommodation we collected general information like what village it is in, how far it is from the city centre and how many stars it has. This information is shown in a list on the right of each page (e.g. http://www.sneeuwsporter.nl/oostenrijk/zillertal-3000/mayrhofen/appartementen-meckyheim/). In addition a text of this accomodation is auto generated based on some of the properties that are also in the list (like distance, stars etc). Below the paragraph about the accommodation is a paragraph about the village the accommodation is located in, this is a general text that is the same with all the accommodations in this village. Below that is a general text about the resort area, this text is also identical on all the accommodation pages in the area. So a lot of these texts about the village and area are used many times on different pages. Things went well at first and every day we got more Google traffic, and more and more pages. But a few days ago our organic traffic took a near 100% dive, we are hardly listed anymore and if we are at very low places. We expect the Google gave us a penalty. We expect this to be the case because of 2 reasons: we have auto generated text that only vary slightly per page we re-use the content about villages and area's on many pages We quickly removed the content of the villages and resort area's because we are pretty sure that this is definitely something Google does not want. We are less sure about the auto generated content, is this something we should remove as well? These are normal readable text, they just happen to be structured more or less the same way on every page. Finally, when we made these and maybe some other fixes, what is the best and quickest ways to let Google see us again and show them we improved? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | sneeuwsporter0 -
How do crawl errors from SEOmoz tool set effect rankings?
Hello - The other day I presented the crawl diagnostic report to a client. We identified duplicate page title errors, missing meta description errors, and duplicate content errors. After reviewing the report we presented it to the clients web company who operates a closed source CMS. Their response was that these errors are not worthy of fixing and in fact they are not hurting the site. We are having issues getting the errors fixed and I would like your opinion on this matter. My question is, how bad are these errors? Should we not fix them? Should they be fixed? Will fixing the errors have an impact on our site's rankings? Personally, I think the question is silly. I mean, the errors were found using the SEOmoz tool kit, these errors have to be effecting SEO.....right? The attached image is the result of the Crawl Diagnostics that crawled 1,400 pages. NOTE: Most of the errors are coming from Pages like blog/archive/2011-07/page-2 /blog/category/xxxxx-xxxxxx-xxxxxxx/page-2 testimonials/147/xxxxx--xxxxx (xxxx represents information unique to the client) Thanks for your insight! c9Q33.png
Technical SEO | | Gabe0 -
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