Learn about using URLs for search engine optimization from an SEO Agency
Absolute URLs or Relative URLs… What? Yes, that may be the reaction for most newcomers to building websites. In fact, many new webmasters will build links as Absolute URLs without knowing that they have a choice in the matter.
Absolute URLs are those that define the actual domain name in the URL link. Relative URLs are those that define the path of a URL on a domain, without actually including the domain name in the URL.
For example:
- Absolute URL’s look like this:
- Relative URL’s look like this: /index.php
There are advantages in using both configurations, but one is best for search engine optimization, say many SEO agencies.
With Absolute URLs, you are telling search engines and internet browsers that the visitor must absolutely go to the defined URL – hence the description Absolute URLs.
With Relative URLs, you are telling search engines and internet browsers how to get to the next page, based on looking at where the browser is currently.
For example, a link that looks like (../index.php) tells both the search engine and the browser that it should go up one level and then get the index.php file. Note the inclusion of three dots in front of the slash. The three dots with the slash indicate that the file desired is in the directory immediately above the current directory.
Where Relative URLs are most powerful is when you are buying a third-party script or software to install on your website. Because the software designer does not know in advance what your domain is going to be, but more importantly, does not know what directory or sub-directory in which you are going to place the script, it must be able to communicate directly within its own structure to get to where it needs to go.
Say for example you bought a script and placed it in the directory . The script will need to talk to other pages in the setup as if it knew where those other pages should be located. If the companion files were organized with Absolute URLs, then if you were to change the name of the hosting directory for the script, your doing so would break the script completely. However, if the script is designed for Relative URLs, the script would always find the files it needs to find.
SEO Agency explains the advnatage of Absolute URLs
At the end of the day SEO agencies say, there is only one SEO advantage to using Absolute URL’s as opposed to Relative URLs, which is that you can tell Google’s spider that you only want it to document your pages under one specific sub-domain.
Let us provide you with one more example to end this article on SEO and Absolute URLs. Visit http://Google.com/, http://www.google.com/, or you can try the new beta search at: . When you utilize the www2.sandbox.Google.com, all the links are set up as Absolute URL’s, since Google wants you to only see pages presented in their Beta Search format, as opposed to their live search version.