Question regarding eCommerce sites, relative URLs and secuirty certificates
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We recently installed a new SSL certificate on an ecommerce site. Our IT Director is insisting that all pages on the site must be coded in such a way so that the address bar maintains a green background when a visitor is navigating the site after navigating to a secure page or logging in.
I have worked on many ecommerce sites and never has this been an issue. Amazon does not use the green bar....but they are Amazon.
In order for this to work, he is insisting that all internal URLs be coded as relative instead of absolute.
How bad is this for SEO or does it really not matter that much? How crucial is it for trust and security?
Opinions welcome!
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Dana,
/blog would be ok in some circumstances, and ../blog in others. It depends on where you are linking from and to. The ".." means the page being linked to is one level up in the hierarchy defined by the path. So if you're linking to www.mysite.com/notblog/filename from www.mysite.com/blog/postname you would use .. while if you are linking to www.mysite.com/blog/filename you would not.
Your developer is probably insisting this because the security certificate doesn't validate on the development or Q&A site, or possibly because you use subdomains. I don't see why an absolute path on the same domain would cause an error.
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Thanks Streamline! Would this happen because of the ".." before the forward slash? In other words "/blog" would be okay yes?
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Relative URLs are not inherently bad for SEO, but they oftentimes trip up webmasters if less than 100% of the links on the site are valid. For example, using a link like "../blog" will tell the search engines to go to http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog and then http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog/blog and so on, causing the crawlers to get trapped in an endless loop which is obviously not ideal for SEO. So as long as you are on top of making sure the relative URLs are always valid, then you should be fine.
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