Internal link question
-
Hello,
I was wondering if internal links should be full urls? for instance my coder might put "page-title.html" but I was wondering if its better for seo to have it be the full url "http://www.blah-blah.com/page-title.html"
thanks in advance..... I love this place!
-
I have been researching this further. If I want to change this on our large Website, I'm going to need major evidence that it's better and that it won't slow down our pages. In this article, Andy King makes the case for relative URLs. But he also says:
"Using the
baseelement and mod_rewrite can alleviate the need for absolute URLs, and save additional space."Is this a true and accurate statement?
-
You are on the right track Dana. No, using absolute URLs is not going to cause a meaningful increase in server response time / page load time. I would look at other sitewide header/footer issues, javascripts / CSS and possible images on CDN etc.
-
I would recommend you to do absolute linking as its more accurate with less chances of any mistake in your internal linking effort!
-
Thank you Patrick for the link and Scott for the question. We just replaced all of our canonical tags with absolute URLs and i solved a lot of problems with weird URLs showing up as duplicate content in GWT.
UGH, but you both totally burst my bubble! I tell you what, just when you think you're cranking along in the world of SEO something comes along to humble you. Recently, I had been going through many old articles, some of which had absolute URLs. I was methodically going in and replacing them with relative links because we are on the page speed warpath right now and our IT director is convinced relative URLs reduce server calls and make the page load faster. After everything I read tonight, including the Yoast Post, it seems that the difference in page load speed between a page with absolute and a page with relative URLs is so tiny that it just doesn't matter. Furthermore, search engines my attribute more authority flowing from one page to the next on a site using absolute URLs for internal links.
Follow up question: We do not have gzip enabled. Our site speed is painfully slow (GWT reports average speed as 698 milliseconds) and we also don't have anything like the mod_deflate enabled on Apache....could the relative URLs in our case, actually have an impact on page speed?
If not, clearly I've got to circle back and undo the relative URLs I've put up on both of our sites in the past 2 weeks! ...sigh
Let me know - tomorrow's another day!
Dana
-
I would do full URLs. If your site gets scraped, you'll get a link pointing back.
-
I'd suggest using absolute (full) URLs whenever possible just to ensure you don't accidentally miss any relative URLs if you happen to move content/pages around. Yoast actually has a great blog post about why it makes sense to use full URLs whenever possible - http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/
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
-
Internal linking
Hi Guy's, Whats the best way to set internal links on your website: 1. href=: /page/
On-Page Optimization | | Happy-SEO
2. href=: https://domain.com/page/ Thanks!0 -
What on-site issue could be causing Moz to not detect internal links?
Hey guys, We've done a crawl and none of our internal links are showing up. Are there any on-page factors that would prevent Moz from being able to detect our internal links? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | ATMOSMarketing560 -
Wordpress category links not working
Hi All of sudden, my category links are not working. Any tips on figuring out what's causing this? Looks like permalink problem with newer wordpress version. I turned off all the plugins see if this cause any problems. Still not being able to find any option. Here's my site http://www.hibebefetaldoppler.com/fetal-doppler-questions-and-answers/ Thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | BistosAmerica0 -
Quick Question on Redirects
This might be a silly question, but one important enough for me to ensure that I understand the best practice of URL redirects... I'm thinking of changing my URL's and hierachy of some of my WP subpages around, in order to logically fit the keyword into the url and place the subpage closer to the root domain. My question is, when doing this, can I simply edit the URL and create a redirect after the fact, essentially killing the old URL. Or, do I create the new page with the updated URL and hierarchy, keeping the old page live and intact, but have that 301 redirect to its new corresponding destination? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | JayAdams320 -
How do I Avoid Excessive Internal Links on an eCommerce site?
I think I'm getting dinged for this on Term Target because the page is full of products, which have links to their product page, but I'm not sure.
On-Page Optimization | | PageLogic0 -
The Value of Internal Links?
I have seen countless SEO "experts" suggest internal links are great to help the search engines find your content. I wonder if that is true any more. It seems like a sitemap would do a better job. I think tags may even hurt the content I want to Google to know as most important. I'm using Simple Tags on all of my WP sites. If it "sees" a word in the article that is also a tag it adds a link for that tag to a listing of all the articles with that tag. It only does this once per tag though. Going on the experts advice, I thought this was a good idea. But now, I'm thinking these tags reduce the value of links to my eBook or other content i want to feature. Which doesn't get tagged much since I don't promote it all that often on my site within content. I make it nearly impossible to miss it on the site though. 🙂 What I do see the tags doing is helping users find the content. So I do see it improving the bounce rate and giving uses an assist in finding more content about what they are looking for. I have tags marked as noindex follow. But I'm really considering now removing the links. I hate plugins anyway. 🙂 Seems I'm always finding another must have plugin though. Now I'm thinking I'd be better off to just add links manually into the content that I really want to feature. All these automatic links I'm generating can't be good. Thanks for your thoughts on this.
On-Page Optimization | | RustyF0 -
Link Juice not passing for root domain to an internal page
Hi Im working in a SEO proyect for the web fagorarrasate.com, it has good root domain ranking, but it seems like the root domain isn't passing any of its link juice to other internal pages of the site although there are links which link to these sub pages For example if I seach in Google for the page http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&gcx=c&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Stamping+System+and+Presses The firs page appears without any page ranking, so it seems that the root domain is not passing any of its ranking Why could this be happening? Thanks Jordi
On-Page Optimization | | joralles0 -
Very basic hands-on type of question about SEO
Hello, I am a complete newbie to the world of SEO and I have read few thing available on the net about things to begin with (so google seo guide and then seomoz beginers tutorial) and I just wanted to ask if I understand the process correctly: So I have my website lest call it abcd.com and there I might have a subpage about certain type of robots or specific parts that these robots are built from. I do my keyword search using adwords keyword search tool. Where I get 10 phrases (phrase1, phrase2, phrase3 so on..) that could be used by users to search information about certain type of robots I wrote on my website. Let's asume all 10 of those phrases have low competition so they can all be used. And they are from the long tail ofcourse so let's say I can get 10,000 searches from them per month. Some of them would have 200 searches, some 1500, some 5000 per month in that google adwords report. After reading those basic tutorials I understand it this way: I put one or two best phrases of those 10 in my <title></p> <p>2) I describe the website as accurately as possible to those keywords in <meta description> i.e. Those specific robots are built from those specific parts - we know all about them.</p> <p>3) I put all of them in <meta keywords> phrase1,2,3, etc.</p> <p>4) I use one or two phrases in <h1> on the page with article</p> <p>5) then I use those phrases in the text that's on that particular page of my website - text is about certain type of robots and parts etc.</p> <p>6) I put photos on that page with alt descriptions that may contain some of these phrases</p> <p>7) to be honest I don't know how am I suppose to build links from that page about certain type of robots to anywhere else on my website - but I undestand that's the part of SEO as well</p> <p>And that's pretty much how I understand the basics of SEO. I read about it and I just don't know if that's what I am suppose to do. Silly me!</p> <p> </p></title>
On-Page Optimization | | lolskizz1