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
-
Subdomain or subfolder?
Hello, We are working on a new site. The idea of the site is to have an ecommerce shop, but the homepage will be a content page, basically a blog page.
Technical SEO | | pinder325
My developer wants to have the blog (home) page on a subdomain, so blog.example.com, because it will be easier to make a nice content page this way, and the the rest of the site will just be on the root domain (example.com). I'm just worried that this will be bad for our SEO efforts. I've always thought it was better to use a sub folder rather than a subdomain. If we get links to the content on the subdomain, will the link juice flow to the shop, on the root domain? What are your thoughts?0 -
Problems with Meta Title on Bing
On the Bing search engine, it isn't showing the actual meta title we have for a website. It's showing something different. However, the correct meta title is showing on the Google search engine. Has anyone had the same issue? Has anyone been able to fix this issue? Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Harrison.Stickboy0 -
Www2 vs www problem
Hi, I have a website that has an old version and a new version. The content is not duplicate on the different versions.
Technical SEO | | TihomirPetrov
The point is that the old version uses www. and non-www before the domain and the new one uses www2. My questions is: Is that a problem and what should be done? Thank you in advance!0 -
Does using data-href="" work more effectively than href="" rel="nofollow"?
I've been looking at some bigger enterprise sites and noticed some of them used HTML like this: <a <="" span="">data-href="http://www.otherodmain.com/" class="nofollow" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"></a> <a <="" span="">Instead of a regular href="" Does using data-href and some javascript help with shaping internal links, rather than just using a strict nofollow?</a>
Technical SEO | | JDatSB0 -
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 -
Is it a problem to have a homepage with a slug / URL ?
Hi, We are designing a web site for one of our clients, and using a home made CMS. I don't know how this CMS has been built, but anyways, in the end the homepage has a URL format which looks like this : www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html. No www.mydomain.com. Is it dangerous for SEO to have a slug/URL directly on the homepage ? Do you have experiences, cases where it has impacted a site negatively ? The main problem I expect is duplicate content (with Google seeing both www.mydomain.com and www.mydomain.com/my-custom-url.html as being different pages) but apparently the CMS is doing a 302 redirect from the root domain to the URL (I told my colleague it should at least be a 301). Sorry if this question seems like basic SEO knowledge, but I really can't find a definitive answer on the subject. Thank you very much 🙂
Technical SEO | | edantadis0 -
Trailing Slash Problems
Link juice being split between trailing slash and non versions. ie. ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk and ldnwicklesscandles.com/scentsy-uk/ Initially asked in here and was told to do a rewrite in the htaccess file. I don't have access to this with squarespace, nor can I add canonical tags on a page by page basis. 301 redirect from scentsy-uk to scentsy-uk/ didn't work either...said that the redirect wasn't completing in an error message on the browser. Squarespace hasn't been very helpful at all. My question is....is there another way to fix this? or should I just call it a day with squarespace and move to wordpress?
Technical SEO | | cmjolley0 -
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