Absolute vs Relative URL Interlinking Observation & Question
-
So I've read a few articles about this here on SEOMOZ and other sites.
I understand the benefit of relative url linking from a developer's point view. I've also read that using either internal linking methods doesn't really have any real SEO benefits or cons that would impact your rankings greatly. (Except with the slight chance of getting traffic and backlinks from a scraper site.)
But I'm seeing examples where this may not be true.
I did a search for 5 star hotels in Vegas in google.
Some of the top results were Hotels.com and Expedia.com
Priceline.com was on the second page.
I used the search operator link: to Hotels.com, Expedia.com and Priceline.com vegas hotel pages respectively:
Hotels.com: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&site=webhp&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.hotels.com%2Fde1504033-st5%2Ffive-star-hotels-las-vegas-nevada%2F&oq=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.hotels.com%2Fde1504033-st5%2Ffive-star-hotels-las-vegas-nevada%2F&gs_l=serp.3...3650.7043.0.7972.8.7.1.0.0.0.90.363.7.7.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1j2.4kALxt0jpxI
Expedia.com: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=d&site=webhp&q=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.expedia.com%2F5Star-Las-Vegas-Hotels.s50-0-d178276.Travel-Guide-Filter-Hotels&oq=link%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.expedia.com%2F5Star-Las-Vegas-Hotels.s50-0-d178276.Travel-Guide-Filter-Hotels&gs_l=serp.3...1681.3746.0.4076.6.6.0.0.0.0.100.348.5j1.6.0.les%3B..0.0...1c.1j2.KxqwbH-YFV0
The results were that priceline had no backlinks internally or externally to their vegas page. Whereas their competitors did, most of which were from their own internal pages. Looking at priceline's linking structure and architecture, they use a relative url structure and sessions ids to link to various pages. Their competitors don't. Wouldn't you argue that this may be adversely affecting their rankings. I know other things are to be factored in if you dig deeper. But that seems to be a major difference. It just seems that their content management system or how their site is coded isn't really passing link juice.
-
Thanks Tammy. It's good to have a second opinion confirming my suspicions. I agree the whole structure of the site needs a lot of work.
Thanks again!
-
I wouldn't argue at all, I would agree. It is an old school SEO tidbit that you should not use relative URL's when building a site structure with the silo level landing pages. While the over all theme of the page is beneficial for general terms, you are losing valuable page rank/ link juice and the capability of ranking for long tail keywords. While the over all structure of the site as a whole needs work, and entire overhaul and recommendations for a virtual cross linking to the top level landing pages and specific content relevant to those terms.
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
-
Silo Structure Question
Hi guys I'm trying to implement silos on a new website. I'm confused. SEO experts say you should first research all your keyphrases (done that) and then only create 1 page per keyphrase. I can see this makes sense if you did e.g. Italian Cooking - then did sub posts like Norther Italian Cooking, Vegetarian Italian Cooking etc - because those sub posts also contain the main keyphrase 'Italian Cooking'. Where I get confused, is they then have pages e.g. Pasta Dough. I can't quite see the benefit of having a sub post that is essentially about something (semantically) unrelated to the main page keyphrase we are trying to optimize on. I could understand doing a post e.g. 'Pasta Dough in Italian Cooking'. That page would be related and I can then see how the links from that page would have relevance for Google. But just Pasta Dough? In 1 siloing example I saw a main topic of Websites. Under that they had things like Website Design, Website Building, which make sense. Then they have 'Online Shop' as a sub-post. It's only related if you know it's related. Am I missing the point here? Is the point NOT to necessarily create pages related to the exact keyphrase, but instead create pages with a view to creating relevant links on those subpages to the main page? I hope someone understands the confusion here. I think my head is still stuck in mininets from 20 years ago 🙂 Any help would be very appreciated, many thanks.
Competitive Research | | ManM0untain2 -
Price for SEO Audit & Strategy
Hello, I am a part-time SEO and own a few web properties, in addition to owning other small businesses. I do the best I can in my spare time to grow my site's traffic and try to create decently valuable content. However, I feel like I am not getting the best results possible, so I am wondering if anyone on here would be interested in helping me with a site audit and strategy. I can do the grunt work myself, I just want someone with a fresh perspective to weigh in and guide me on what I should focus on to achieve my goals. Please let me know if you're interested and how much it may cost. A range is fine. Here are the specs on my site & niche: About 20 pages of content, most of which have 96-100 page optimization scores on Moz. DA of 19, home PA 32 Most competitive KW is 22 difficulty, 83 opp and 67 potential. Thanks so much, any insight is much appreciated. Please respond here or DM me directly. Best, Ricardo
Competitive Research | | myriad_ricardo1 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
What keywords & phrases are my competitors targeting?
I wanted to compare our keyword focus, to my competitors. What is the best way to audit what type of content / keywords - my competitors are using?
Competitive Research | | jwochna0 -
Duplicate content for www & non-www results
why would my campaign show duplicate content entries for www & non-www versions of my url? Here's an example I have a page called 'mydomain.com/resources/', and the campaign analysis shows it as being duplicate content, with the duplicate being 'www.mydomain.com/resources'. I don't know where I can adjust this or if it is perhaps related to some other setting, like Google Analytics or something else. /G
Competitive Research | | swdmedia0 -
Quick question about country specific organic results
Do you think that if your website is from your home country. You will rank better for some keyword even when you dont have much page authority when compared to other websites having much higher page authorities from other countries.
Competitive Research | | ksbnok0 -
How to track competitor who uses another website on the url?
Hi everyone, The thing is pretty simple: I have a competitor who uses a different format of url, very similar to this: www.example.com - but he started to use a thing like this: example.mtv.com The problem is that every analysis that I make tell me something about mtv.com instead of the site I want. The url is redirected. Sorry about my english, but I think it is very clear. I want to know how to track something like this, because even in competitor analysis I'm getting info about the big site, and not the one I need. Thank you very much.
Competitive Research | | bluehelmet0 -
Amazon vs. eBay
I'm doing an analysis to understand why Amazon outranks eBay sometimes. They are both big brands with alot of trust so just want to confirm my thinking and maybe gain some new insight. Amazon has more pages indexed (in Google), more internal links (pointing to homepage), and more images indexed in Google Image Search (alot more!), and of course a higher page rank.. So, question I would like to run by everyone, is are the stats basically what is responsible for Amazon's SEO success as compared to eBay? Or, is there something else I'm missing? PR: eBay 7, Amazon 9 Pages Indexed: eBay 106M, Amazon 875M Internal Links: eBay 62, Amazon 261 Google Images: eBay 150M, Amazon 4.3B
Competitive Research | | sofia120