Internal link question

[Superflys]

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!

[danatanseo]

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?

[NakulGoyal]

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.

[JawwadQD]

I would recommend you to do absolute linking as its more accurate with less chances of any mistake in your internal linking effort!

[danatanseo]

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

[Francisco_Meza]

I would do full URLs. If your site gets scraped, you'll get a link pointing back.

[StreamlineMetrics]

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/