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
base
element 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
-
International website - Image names
Hello All! In an international website, it is recommended to have a copy of every image for every language in the website (with translate filenames)? or it is better to use only one copy of each image and change only the alt attributes? Thanks for the help.
On-Page Optimization | | dMaLasp0 -
Internal Linking From Blog to Website
Hi all, I'm just seeking opinions on something an external company have told us about linking from our blog to our website... Our website is; www.XYZ.com and our blog is www.XYZ.com/blog I add content to the blog on an almost daily basis and generally link on average 3 times from the blog (internally) to a various relevant pages on our website. Today I was told that by doing this I am 'diluting' the link juice which I understand but don't agree with... All I am doing is a form of internal linking which as far as I am aware is a good on-page technique? Just curious to learn other people's view on this... Many thanks Andy
On-Page Optimization | | TomKing0 -
Language for URLs on new international websites
We are due to launch our new site and it will be targeting an international market. We have setup these new sites in the following way www.website.com/fr/content-goes-here www.website.com/es/content-goes-here This has been done in conjunction with setting up the parameters in GWT and making sure it is optimised for the language itself, and that countries search engine. But our web dev team have said that the URLs at the moment will be in english and not the native language, so if you were on the french version of our site you would see the url in english and not french. Will this negatively affect the site for SEO, and who else would think it would be negative from a usability perspective? Any help is appreciated.
On-Page Optimization | | RyanCrawf19840 -
Blog Question
Hello! I try to add as much fresh content to my site weekly, I do also have a blog that I update 3 times per week. Will google crawl frequently if I am updating info on my wordpress hosted blog when my blog name is www.blog.mywebsite.com? and the sites name is www.mywebsite.com? Will they treat them as separate domains? Thank you!!
On-Page Optimization | | TP_Marketing0 -
Copyscape Duplicate Content Ownership Question
We have a site that has had its content copied verbatim to numerous other sites and articles. We were advised to change our content but the content is originally ours. Does google take that into account before they apply duplicate penalties? And shouldn't copyscape be able to show this information in their reports? It just doesnt seem right that the originating author would have to change content because everyone else is stealing it. Any clarification on this?
On-Page Optimization | | anthonytjm0 -
To Many Links On Page
I'm having a problem on a crawl warning for our main site. The warning is that every one of my pages has to many links, a little over 1,000 on almost all of them. I think this is because our category list on our left hand sidebar has so many categories, and that sidebar appears on every last one of our pages even all the way into our products. Can anyone take a look and tell me if this is the reason why and what I could possibly do about this? Thanks in advance! www.Ocelco.com
On-Page Optimization | | Mike.Bean0 -
Do you follow any special pattern with internal links?
Just as topic states! Any recommendations? Cheers everyone, n-joy beautiful weather.
On-Page Optimization | | DiamondJewelryEmpire0 -
Page title in SERP question
Has anyone typed in a phrase in Google and seen their listing on the SERP, but the page title on the Google SERP is not what the CMS is set to ? Ie the page title in the SERP is not what is expected? Something related to the company, but not what is set on the CMS… Very odd – has anyone seen something like this before? What could be causing it? Is there a way to change it?
On-Page Optimization | | inhouseninja0