Skip to content
    Moz logo Menu open Menu close
    • Products
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Pro Home
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Home
      • STAT
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Home
      • Compare SEO Products
      • Moz Data
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis
      • Keyword Explorer
      • Link Explorer
      • Competitive Research
      • MozBar
      • More Free SEO Tools
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO
      • SEO Learning Center
      • Moz Academy
      • MozCon
      • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers
      • Agency Solutions
      • Enterprise Solutions
      • Small Business Solutions
      • The Moz Story
      • New Releases
    • Log in
    • Log out
    • Products
      • Moz Pro

        Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

      • Moz Local

        Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

      • STAT

        SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

      • Moz API

        Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

      • Compare SEO Products

        See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

      • Moz Data

        Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research
      Moz Pro

      Track AI Overviews in Keyword Research

      Try it free!
    • Free SEO Tools
      • Domain Analysis

        Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

      • Keyword Explorer

        Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

      • Link Explorer

        Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

      • Competitive Research

        Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

      • MozBar

        See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

      • More Free SEO Tools

        Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
      Moz Pro

      NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

      Learn more
    • Learn SEO
      • Beginner's Guide to SEO

        The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

      • SEO Learning Center

        Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

      • On-Demand Webinars

        Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

      • How-To Guides

        Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

      • Moz Academy

        Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

      • MozCon

        Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
      Moz API

      Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

      Find your plan
    • Blog
    • Why Moz
      • Digital Marketers

        Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

      • Small Business Solutions

        Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

      • Agency Solutions

        Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

      • Enterprise Solutions

        Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

      • The Moz Story

        Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

      • New Releases

        Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

      Surface actionable competitive intel
      New Feature

      Surface actionable competitive intel

      Learn More
    • Log in
      • Moz Pro
      • Moz Local
      • Moz Local Dashboard
      • Moz API
      • Moz API Dashboard
      • Moz Academy
    • Avatar
      • Moz Home
      • Notifications
      • Account & Billing
      • Manage Users
      • Community Profile
      • My Q&A
      • My Videos
      • Log Out

    The Moz Q&A Forum

    • Forum
    • Questions
    • Users
    • Ask the Community

    Welcome to the Q&A Forum

    Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

    1. Home
    2. SEO Tactics
    3. Technical SEO
    4. 301 redirect relative or absolute path?

    Moz Q&A is closed.

    After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.

    301 redirect relative or absolute path?

    Technical SEO
    3
    7
    25188
    Loading More Posts
    • Oldest to Newest
    • Newest to Oldest
    • Most Votes
    Reply
    • Reply as question
    Log in to reply
    This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
    • Silviu
      Silviu last edited by

      Hello everyone,

      Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones.

      The way the technical guys did this is:

      "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
      meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
      "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html"

      This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader).

      The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect?

      Thanks,
      S.

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • Silviu
        Silviu @AriNahmani last edited by

        Thanks Ari!

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
        • crackingmedia
          crackingmedia @Silviu last edited by

          Hi Silviu

          It is as Ari said - source URL is relative and destination URL is absolute.

          Peter

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
          • AriNahmani
            AriNahmani @Silviu last edited by

            the destination URL should 100% be absolute!

            Silviu 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
            • Silviu
              Silviu @AriNahmani last edited by

              Thank you for the tip Ari, but our website is not using apache and htaccess, so the rules are written in another language, but I'm sure this is not important.

              The http status of the old urls is 301 to the new relative paths /new-url.html
              and this is where my problem is:
              Should the destination url (the new one) be relative or absolute?

              Silviu

              AriNahmani crackingmedia 2 Replies Last reply Reply Quote 0
              • AriNahmani
                AriNahmani last edited by

                301 Redirects should always be programmed and thought of us relative to full path.

                in htaccess, it should look like this:

                redirect 301 /old-page-name.html http://www.full-website-name.com/new-page-name.html
                redirect 301 /old-page-name2.html http://www.full-website-name.com/new-page-name2.html

                and so on and so forth..

                Which pages lost traffic - old ones or new ones? If you could send an example (or email it if you're willing) id be happy to take a peak.

                Silviu 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                • crackingmedia
                  crackingmedia last edited by

                  Hi Silviu

                  There is always the possibility of some SEO value being lost when you implement a 301 redirection so that may be why you have seen a hit.

                  Have a look at Moz's information on this here...

                  Note this paragraph: A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.

                  One thing though, I have never seen relative redirection for the same domain written as "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html" but always as "/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com//new-url.html". I'm not saying the other way wouldn't work - which if the links are working correctly when you follow them they clearly are - but just not seen that.

                  I hope the above helps,
                  Peter

                  1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
                  • 1 / 1
                  • First post
                    Last post

                  Got a burning SEO question?

                  Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.


                  Start my free trial


                  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.

                  • See all categories

                  Related Questions

                  • TaraLP

                    Delete old blog posts after 301 redirects to new pages?

                    Hi Moz Community, I've recently created several new pages on my site using much of the same copy from blog posts on the same topics (we did this for design flexibility and a few other reasons). The blogs and pages aren't exactly identical, as the new pages have much more content, but I don't think there's a point to having both and I don't want to have duplicate content, so we've used 301 redirects from the old blog posts to the new pages of the same topic. My question is: can I go ahead and delete the old blog posts? (Or would there be any reasons I shouldn't delete them?) I'm guessing with the 301 redirects, all will be well in the world and I can just delete the old posts, but I wanted to triple check to make sure. Thanks so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it!

                    Technical SEO | | TaraLP
                    1
                  • TimHolmes

                    301 redirect adding trailing slash to url

                    I am looking into a .htacess file for a site I look after and have noticed that the urls are all 301 redirecting from a none slash directory to a trailing slashed directory/folders. e.g. www.domain.com/folder gets 301 redirected to www.domain.com/folder/ Will this do much harm and reduce the effect on the page and any links pointing to the site be lessened? Secondly I am not sure what part of my htaccess is causing the redirect. RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.co.uk [NC] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
                    RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.co.uk/$1 [L,R,NE] RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php
                    RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ /$1 [R=301,L] or could a wordpress ifmodule be causing the problem? Any info would be apreciated.

                    Technical SEO | | TimHolmes
                    0
                  • Dan-Lawrence

                    Creating a CSV file for uploading 301 redirect URL map

                    Hi if i'm bulk uploading 301 redirects whats needed to create a csv file? is it just a case of creating an excel spreadsheet & have the old urls in column A and new urls in column B and then just convert to csv and upload ? or do i need to put in other details or paremeters etc etc ? Cheers Dan

                    Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence
                    0
                  • IM_Learner

                    301 Redirect on a PDF, DOCX files?

                    Hi, I have to rename many pdf and docx files. How can I implement 301 redirect on them as they are linked from 'n' number of places? Regards, Shailendra Sial

                    Technical SEO | | IM_Learner
                    1
                  • Squall315

                    Will bad things happen if I cancel 301 site redirect?

                    Hi, please someone help! We have two identical websites, say A & B. Because of the not so good SEO establishment, site B was built and site A was 301 redirected to site B weeks ago. For some reasons, we have to reuse site A, which means we have to cancel the 301 redirection. (Sound a little crazy) So the question are: 1. Can we conduct the action? 2. If we cant, what's the reason? 3. If we can, what would be the best practice? Thanks for help in advance! Plus: we also CARE what would happen to site B if the 301 is cancelled? Will it grow healthy like a new site?

                    Technical SEO | | Squall315
                    0
                  • Gmorgan

                    301 redirects & merging two sites into one

                    We have a client that has two sites that rank well for different searches in their market. The main pages ranking are things like advice articles and news pieces. For various reasons, they just want one site. I believe they need to duplicate the content from the outgoing site and place it on the main site, with a 301 redirect from each old page to each new one. What happens when they eventually want to redirect the entire domain? Would these smaller, internal redirects become obsolete, therefore removing any link value they once had? I am not sure how this works or if there is a best practice way to do this. Thanks Gareth

                    Technical SEO | | Gmorgan
                    0
                  • Ant-808

                    How long will Google take to stop crawling an old URL once it has been 301 redirected

                    I need to do a clean-up old urls that have been redirected in sitemap and was wondering about this.

                    Technical SEO | | Ant-808
                    0
                  • EvergladesDirect

                    200 Redirects for SEO instead of 301

                    We are working with a company on re-platforming our website.  On a call yesterday they outlined a strategy to use 200 redirects for our top keywords instead of 301s.  I am not familiar with this type of redirect and was wondering if anyone could provide some more insight.

                    Technical SEO | | EvergladesDirect
                    0

                  Get started with Moz Pro!

                  Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                  Start my free trial
                  Products
                  • Moz Pro
                  • Moz Local
                  • Moz API
                  • Moz Data
                  • STAT
                  • Product Updates
                  Moz Solutions
                  • SMB Solutions
                  • Agency Solutions
                  • Enterprise Solutions
                  • Digital Marketers
                  Free SEO Tools
                  • Domain Authority Checker
                  • Link Explorer
                  • Keyword Explorer
                  • Competitive Research
                  • Brand Authority Checker
                  • Local Citation Checker
                  • MozBar Extension
                  • MozCast
                  Resources
                  • Blog
                  • SEO Learning Center
                  • Help Hub
                  • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                  • How-to Guides
                  • Moz Academy
                  • API Docs
                  About Moz
                  • About
                  • Team
                  • Careers
                  • Contact
                  Why Moz
                  • Case Studies
                  • Testimonials
                  Get Involved
                  • Become an Affiliate
                  • MozCon
                  • Webinars
                  • Practical Marketer Series
                  • MozPod
                  Connect with us

                  Contact the Help team

                  Join our newsletter
                  Moz logo
                  © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                  • Accessibility
                  • Terms of Use
                  • Privacy

                  Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.