Relative Vs. Absolute Links
So, I just took the SEOmoz SEO quiz (see the previous post) and one of the questions I got wrong was to do with absolute/relative links.
I think the question was along the lines of:
Why is it better to use absolute links (http://www.domain.com/page.php) rather than relative links (/page.php) when doing cross site linking?
The options for the answer were something like:
- If it gets scrapped it will link back to your site
- Keyword of domain
- And two others I can’t remember…
Unfortunately I left the answers page before I had a chance to look at the correct answer.
I wondered if anyone who knows a thing or two about SEO could explain this to me or alternatively point me in the direction of a good article/post on the subject?
It was the only question I got wrong that I was particularly interested in!
Here’s to hoping someone will notice this and respond! 
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September 12th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
I ‘ve mailed everyone in Search to get some answers…
September 12th, 2007 at 6:06 pm
Did anyone tell you anything?
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:11 pm
Hi Adam,
Apologies for not picking this one up - I see no-one has gotten back to you about this. You’ve actually mis-quoted the question slightly which may be why you’re not seeing the answer
The question from SEOmoz was as follows:
“Why are absolute (http://www.mysite.com/my-category)URLs better than relative (”/my-category”) URLs for on-page INTERNAL linking?”
And the answer from SEOmoz as follows:
“Correct Answer: When scraped and copied on other domains, they provide a link back to the website
None of the answers makes sense, except that which refers to scrapers, who often copy pages without changing links and will thus link back to your site, helping to reduce duplicate content issues, and potentially provide some link value as well.”
Which I think I pretty much agree with. It also reduces the impact of any duplicate content issues you might have due to multiple domains resolving to the same content.
Hope that answers your question!
September 23rd, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Ah. Yeh I did some further research after and pretty much came to the same conclusion.
Thanks very much anyway
October 13th, 2007 at 3:56 am
Hey Adam,
Don’t quote me on this, but my hunch is that using absolute links are best because shows the search engine the definitive, unchanging location of the content you are linking to…. and there is no change of confuse it with aliases and abbreviated versions. For instance, if a content management system uses dynamic URLs with lots of parameters.. the search engine crawler might not understand that ../index.html , and http://example.com/1.html and http://example.com/load page=?id=1 are the same content. Linking with the absolute URL reduces the chance for confusion and internal link dilution.