Since the beginning of the World Wide Web webmasters have been creating pages to entice visitors and read their well thought out pages. Sadly, with the birth of the WWW also came scrapers, copycats and good ol’ scrutiny.
With only changing the way you link to pages you can get rid of one of these terrible three (if you consider scrutiny a bad thing that is) or at least make it non-threatening to your site.
What is Absolute Internal Linking?
Absolute linking is when you link to the absolute (entire) URI. For example, if your website is http://example.com and you wrote an article located at http://example.com/giraffe.htm and wanted to link to the page zebra.htm you would link to http://example.com/zebra.htm.
Alright, What is Relative Internal Linking?
Relative linking is when you link to the relative URI. In short, you link to /zebra.htm or ../zebra.htm.
Benefits, Drawbacks, Hearsay
When a website internally links they must use absolute or relative linking. Every website does it. But which is best?
Absolute Linking - Advantages
- Habit. Everyone has routines. Every time we wake up, go to bed or create a web page we perform certain actions. Getting into the habit is a great way to relieve stress later on.
- Good for when you reuse content on http and https.
- Good for sites with subdomains.
- Generally seen as better for SE spiders. Many times on sites that have relative linking you will see mistakes within the logs from the spiders. You will see spiders going to pages that don’t exist because of relative links. e.g. You link to ../zebra.htm above the directory animal and instead of going to animal/zebra.htm the spider decides to go to /zebra.htm
- Absolute linking makes it tougher on scrapers. Many scraper bots only scrape, then post. If a bot decides to do this they will keep every link back to your website in tact.
Absolute Linking – Disadvantages
- Time consuming.
- Takes longer to create links.
- If you reorganize your website changing every absolute link can become troublesome.
- If you move to a new domain, you will have to change every pages html.
- Larger files. Your HTML will be larger due to the increased number of characters for each internal link.
Relative Linking – Advantages
- Easy to implement.
- Short URIs.
- Not time consuming.
- Smaller files.
Relative Linking – Disadvantages
- SE spiders will have difficult in some cases finding pages.
- Scrapers will feed off the website.
Written: May 29, 2008
Tags: absolute links, internal linking, relative links, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, sem, seo
sir jorge
May 29, 2008 @ 11:37 am | Reply
this is great advice, thank you for the post.
Dennis Edell
May 29, 2008 @ 7:55 pm | Reply
As someone who is at this very moment, going through internal linking this is extremely useful, thanks!
tim
June 1, 2008 @ 4:19 pm | Reply
there is another very important reason that you should only use relative links and never use absolute links
If you ever need to change domain names, or shift your site to a subfolder or subdomain then you will love the choice to use relative links and curse the day you ever used absolute links.
Gary R. Hess
June 2, 2008 @ 11:02 am | Reply
Definitely. This would go under the ‘not time consuming’ bullet I have listed.