SEO and Internal Links: Which is Better if Matters? Absolute or Relative.

Answer 1

I never heard or seen anything that indicates it matters. All you're likely to do is complicate your development. The "highly respected" site is getting good ranking because it's popular, that's all.

It's pretty well a given that search engines store the full path at some point, it's unlikely they wouldn't perform this conversion during the crawl process to remove duplicates.

I don't really follow your logic anyway. You know good structure, relevant content and popularity are the key to ranking so what makes you think you'll gain anything by spending even a minute on random optimisations like this?

Answer 2

Taken from the Search Engine Optimisation FAQ at the SitePoint Forums:

Should I use relative links or absolute links?

Absolute links. It is recommended by Google as it is possible for crawlers to miss some relative links.

If I can find the link that Google states this I'll update this post.

EDIT: This might be what the post is referring to, but I've stated my reasons as to why this might be correct in the comments.

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35156

Answer 3

I highly doubt Google will be missing any relative links. Apparently the latest version of their Crawler will even execute some javascript. Don't bother with absolute links, instead, great a good sitemap and submit it to google through webmaster tools. Yahoo and Microsoft also allow you to submit your sitemap so it might be worthwhile to look into that too - google it.

Answer 4

I don't think there is an answer to this question, but I will weigh in anyways. Personally, I think that using absolute URLs is the best. The web is full of crappy content scrapers. Many of the people who wrote these scrapers forget to change the original URLs (in absolute links) before they post the content onto their own page. So, in that regard, absolute URLs can turn into a really dodgy way to get a couple extra links.

If I follow that, it seems logical that absolute links would also be a great indicator of duplicate content caused by content scrapers.

A couple of years ago, I did some research into what happens to a page's search rankings when you dramatically change content/navigation (ie - in the case of a dramatic re-design). At that point, I found that having absolute URLs seemed to spook Google a little less. But, there were some problems with my research:

a) The 'absolute URL bonus' was barely quantifiable (an average of less than two positions of difference) b) The 'absolute URL bonus' only lasted a few weeks before Google settled down and started treating both pages the same c) The research is two years old and the Google algorithm has changed dramatically in that time

When I add a and b together, I'm left with a very unsettled feeling. Google gets a little weird from time to time, so the bonus may have been a fluke that I attributed to absolute URLs. Good old experimental bias.....Either way though, the difference was so slight and lasted for such a short time that I don't think it is worth spending a whole lot of extra time making absolutes!

Best of luck with your site

Greg