Internal Website Links

[Omicrontau]

This is more of a generalised search engine question but seemed apt to be asked in a Google SEO thread.

My site's internal links are all listed in the format a href="page.html." I was recently reading an article which states search engine spiders love URLs. My question is will my organic rank be higher if my internal links are listed in the a href="http://www.mysite.com/page.html" format instead?

[zinc]

Originally Posted by Omicrontau My question is will my organic rank be higher if my internal links are listed in the a href="http://www.mysite.com/page.html" format instead?

There is no differerence between these:

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/page.html">Link</a> and <a href="page.html">Link</a>

The browser or spider would interpret this as the same. The only time this would be different is with external links i.e. aother site linking to you.

For example these are two entirely different url's in a spider's eyes:

<a href="http://www.mysite.com">Link</a> and <a href="http://www.mysite.com/index.html">Link</a>

Hope that helps

[stevebrowne]

a big difference between relative (page.html) and absolute (h t t p : / / w w w . . c o.u k / page.html) is that IF some dodgy spam site scrapes your site to reuse your content, absolute links will still link back to your normal site. So if they scrape they add new back links for you. Relative links will just link to their copies of your pages.

[joedavies1987]

PLUS and MINUSES of ABSOLUTE INTERNAL LINKING

+ if you syndicate your content the links will still work
+ if you change where a linked page is, the link will still work becuase its absolute
+ It's a safer and more definate way to get indexed (although bots should still see the same URL)

- if you ever plan on moving your site to a different domain, you'll have to change all URLS

Whatever you choose, just make sure you're consistent.