Conversion Matters

So I was still unsure what the deal was with relative vs. absolute links from a search perspective so I’ve decided to dig around a little deeper for some answers.

Quick Recap

Absolute link - <a href=”http://www.site.com/link.html”>
Relative link - <a href=”/link.html”>

Advantages of relative links

Once upon a time shaving a few characters from an html document would decrease the download speeds. However, these days that benefit is almost negligible with *most* people using some form of broadband.

Another main benefit of relative links is if you run an enterprise website that has multiple environments and domains, e.g. a development version of the site and a live version of the site. If you don’t use relative links you have to create variables to show the right ‘base href’ depending on which environment the site is being served from.

Disadvantages of using relative links

If a user follows a link to the non-www version of your website, or the www version - which ever is the non preferred version of the website and you have relative internal links then all the other internal links will also point to the non preferred version of the website (either with/without www).

Why is this an issue?
If a search engine spider is able to follow the link to the non preferred version of your website and then crawl the rest of the site through the relative links you are going to start hitting duplicate content filters because the search engines will be able to see two whole distinct (even if it’s not to the user) versions of your website.

This is bad because the search engine may start to index the non preferred version of your website. A version that very likely has not had much link building and may not be able to rank as or at all for its target keywords.

However, if you’re website uses absolute links it shouldn’t matter too much if a search engine spider reaches your website to the non preferred version because all the links will point back to the preferred version of the site.

You also should try and 301 redirect either the non-www or the www version of the site to the other, depending on which version you prefer. That along with absolute linking should prevent any issues.

As a side note:
One of the reasons I deliberately didn’t use absolute linking (when I wasn’t aware of the possible search issues) was that in wordpress if you link internal using absolute links it pings your own content and leaves trackback urls, which I thought was pretty annoying. However, I’ve since found a plugin that disables the pinging of your own site: No Self Pings.

Finally, there was also some talk of content scrapping. Something along the lines of if you’re content is scrapped and put on other spam sites at least with absolute links it will link back to your website. I didn’t really investigate that much though.

Further resources:

• Relative or absolute links for SEO
• Absolute verses relative linking