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    4. Tool to search relative vs absolute internal links

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    Tool to search relative vs absolute internal links

    Technical SEO
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    • Lindsay_D
      Lindsay_D last edited by

      I'm preparing for a site migration from a .co.uk to a .com and I want to ensure all internal links are updated to point to the new primary domain.

      What tool can I use to check internal links as some are relative and others are absolute so I need to update them all to relative.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Lindsay_D
        Lindsay_D last edited by

        Thanks for the replies, I ended up getting a techie to run a script through the site for me which gave me all the info I needed.  None of the tools mentioned did exactly what I was looking for.

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • ThompsonPaul
          ThompsonPaul last edited by

          That tool that Matt mentioned looked interesting, but it would have been painful to have to go through your site one page at a time.

          As usual for crawling tasks like this, the paid version of Screaming Frog will do what you want. You can tell it to crawl your site looking for **href="yoursite.com **to find all occurrences of absolute internal links. You'd have to do a bit of regex magic to get it to find the relative links, but since by their nature a relative link will work even with the domain change, not sure why you'd be looking for those.

          Or you could just do a find and replace of the URL string using something like phpMyAdmin directly in your database. That would be fastest as it would find & replace in one go, instead of having to manually edit each page.

          Is this a WordPress site, there's a plugin specifically for finding and automatically updating these links. (It basically automates and puts a UI on the phpMyAdmin process mentioned above.)

          Any of those ideas help?

          Paul

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
          • Lindsay_D
            Lindsay_D last edited by

            Any chance anyone knows any other tools I can use to crawl a site and give me a report of absolute and relative internal links?

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • Lindsay_D
              Lindsay_D @MattAntonino last edited by

              Thanks for the reply although I've checked that add-on and it's not available for download anymore. Any chance you can send me the local files? I've mailed the admin but haven't got a reply yet.

              Unless anyone knows of any other tools?

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • MattAntonino
                MattAntonino last edited by

                I'll give you the best answer I can but at least consider the possibility that absolute URLs are actually better long term.  Other than moving a site around as you're doing now, absolute URLs win on every factor.

                That said, you're looking for FireLinkReport.

                http://www.searchenginejournal.com/firelinkreport-research-on-page-links-firefox/17714/

                It's a FFox add on that does internal vs. external, absolute vs. relative, etc. and this should create a report that helps you do what you need.

                Lindsay_D 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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