Internal link question
-
Hello,
I was wondering if internal links should be full urls? for instance my coder might put "page-title.html" but I was wondering if its better for seo to have it be the full url "http://www.blah-blah.com/page-title.html"
thanks in advance..... I love this place!
-
I have been researching this further. If I want to change this on our large Website, I'm going to need major evidence that it's better and that it won't slow down our pages. In this article, Andy King makes the case for relative URLs. But he also says:
"Using the
base
element and mod_rewrite can alleviate the need for absolute URLs, and save additional space."Is this a true and accurate statement?
-
You are on the right track Dana. No, using absolute URLs is not going to cause a meaningful increase in server response time / page load time. I would look at other sitewide header/footer issues, javascripts / CSS and possible images on CDN etc.
-
I would recommend you to do absolute linking as its more accurate with less chances of any mistake in your internal linking effort!
-
Thank you Patrick for the link and Scott for the question. We just replaced all of our canonical tags with absolute URLs and i solved a lot of problems with weird URLs showing up as duplicate content in GWT.
UGH, but you both totally burst my bubble! I tell you what, just when you think you're cranking along in the world of SEO something comes along to humble you. Recently, I had been going through many old articles, some of which had absolute URLs. I was methodically going in and replacing them with relative links because we are on the page speed warpath right now and our IT director is convinced relative URLs reduce server calls and make the page load faster. After everything I read tonight, including the Yoast Post, it seems that the difference in page load speed between a page with absolute and a page with relative URLs is so tiny that it just doesn't matter. Furthermore, search engines my attribute more authority flowing from one page to the next on a site using absolute URLs for internal links.
Follow up question: We do not have gzip enabled. Our site speed is painfully slow (GWT reports average speed as 698 milliseconds) and we also don't have anything like the mod_deflate enabled on Apache....could the relative URLs in our case, actually have an impact on page speed?
If not, clearly I've got to circle back and undo the relative URLs I've put up on both of our sites in the past 2 weeks! ...sigh
Let me know - tomorrow's another day!
Dana
-
I would do full URLs. If your site gets scraped, you'll get a link pointing back.
-
I'd suggest using absolute (full) URLs whenever possible just to ensure you don't accidentally miss any relative URLs if you happen to move content/pages around. Yoast actually has a great blog post about why it makes sense to use full URLs whenever possible - http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/
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.
Related Questions
-
Image Titles and Descriptions Question
Hello, I have a question about optimizing the SEO on my pages through image titles and descriptions. There are a few times on my website that I use the same image on multiple pages. I am under the impression that giving it a title such as "social-media-marketing-agency-graphic.jpg" will help the SEO for the phrase "social media marketing agency" on that page. My question was, if I want to use the same image on multiple pages, am I better off uploading an entirely new image with a new title to make it more relevant to the new page? Or will this not make large enough of a difference? Or is there an easier solution? Please let me know your thoughts on how to best optimize the pages
On-Page Optimization | | brightsocial0 -
Pyramid link structure - how to noindex, nofollow
I'm talking about this article: https://mza.seotoolninja.com/learn/seo/internal-link Take this sample: HOME --> Shirts --> Plain shirt --> shirt#1 Product page: noindex, follow all links except 1 from breadcrumbs to nearest category (plain shirts). SubCategory page (plain shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to nearest category (shirts) and all products belonging to current subcategory. Category page (shirts): noindex, follow all links except 1 link from breadcrumbs to front page (site.com) and links to own subcategories. Front page: noindex, follow all links except 12 links to main categories (shirts, pants etc.) Is it correct? If I noindex some parts of website, will it be harmful?
On-Page Optimization | | SilverStar10 -
Long url links
Just wondering about creating links.
On-Page Optimization | | Robotnik
Is it ok to have very long links?
Like: http://www.robotnik.com/computer-hardware-ram/8gb-ddr3-1600-desktop Is the above too long, is it better for SEO to be more to the point? Also For better SEO, is it better to use hyphens in a domain name or not?0 -
To Many Links & Long Titles
One of our clients currently has a number of pages that "Too many on page links", Now her menu in itself has the majority. With it being an eComerce website it has quite a few categories. How harmfull is this to search rankings. The other side of thing's, Currently the client has a large number of pages where the title of the page is the product, However her products for example could be "The pink fluffy bear 2x4 with extendable arm and voice activation ( batteries not included )" Again, how Harmfull is having a large volume of pages named like this.
On-Page Optimization | | bmkdigital0 -
Outgoing Links Best Practice
Hi, It is my understanding that it is good practice to add relevant out going links to my content pages. I do not intend to over do it and the out going links I intend to add would be useful for the reader. My question is do I need to add noindex/nofollow tags to these links? Does it make any difference either way or can I just leave them as index/follow links? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | UnderMe0 -
Question about the variations of keyphrases on different pages
Hi, I am a big fan of seomoz and read a lot of articles! I have a new site for services in London. I have 5 main keyphrases on 5 different pages. Would it be better to make new pages with variations of those 5 keyphrases? As an example: one of the main keyphrases is "Service London" and I want to create new pages -- "Services West Ruislip", "Services Poplar", "Services Brixton" and etc. Should it be better to do it as described or to keep the 5 main keywords and focus on them? Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | yanko840 -
Tag clouds: good for internal linking and increase of keyword relevant pages?
As Matt Cutts explained, tag clouds are OK if you're not engaged in keyword stuffing (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYPX_ZmhLqg) - i.e. if you're not putting in 500 tags. I'm currently creating tags for an online-bookseller; just like Amazon this e-commerce-site has potentially a couple of million books. Tag clouds will be added to each book detail page in order to enrich each of these pages with relevant keywords both for search engines and users (get a quick overview over the main topics of the book; navigate the site and find other books associated with each tag). Each of these book-specific tag clouds will hold up to 50 tags max, typically rather in the range of up to 10-20. From an SEO perspective, my question is twofold: 1. Does the site benefit from these tag clouds by improving the internal linking structure? 2. Does the site benefit from creating lots of additional tag-specific-pages (up to 200k different tags) or can these pages become a problem, as they don't contain a lot of rich content as such but rather lists of books associated with each tag? Thanks in advance!
On-Page Optimization | | semantopic0