SEO: Relative URL vs Absolute URL

Question

Do search engines care if I use relative paths in my internal links instead of absolute paths?

<a href="/">My site root</a>
<a href="http://mysite.com/"&gt;My site root</a>

Answer 1

Search engine bots only care that your URLs resolve.

Answer 2

Normally, not.

They however advice to include the <base> tag into your HTML HEAD document to indicate the host name to which relative urls should be appended to.

For example, that is what Google says on the use of canonical:

Can the link be relative or absolute?

The rel="canonical" attribute can be used with relative or absolute links, but we recommend using absolute links to minimize potential confusion or difficulties. If your document specifies a base link, any relative links will be relative to that base link.

About rel="canonical"

One more discussion on the topic: SEO & Internal Interlinking: Relative vs Absolute URLs

If you read through multiple discussions on the matter, you will see that some people think this way, other people think the other way but most do not have any proof to support one or the other theory.

Answer 3

I blogged about it sometime ago: http://nirlevy.blogspot.com/2008/07/absolute-vs-relative-urls-and-seo.html

in short: It should not matter, but some people say it does.

Answer 4

The beauty of SEO is nobody knows for sure since search engines like to keep things secret.

For this one though it's almost sure that it makes no difference whatsoever.

Answer 5

Here's what Matt Cutts from Google said:

" I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there's less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused"