Relative Vs Absolute Links: Does it matter?

Impact of relative and abosolute links in the light of search engine and programming

Every day at 4SPOTS is a learning experience.

Today we have launched a support program, through which 4SPOTS IT clients can post their issues directly which will notify the technical persons about various client issues via email. It solves many purposes yet, the experience we had got while developing this functionality is a small but a very important one.

Early days in our website design and development we used internal relative links this: <a href="../">Click here</a> and some of us were using absolute links like this: <a href="http://www.website/page.html">Click here</a>.

Search engines convert relative links to their absolute locations prior to assigning the page a document identification. It is preferable to use absolute URLs for many reasons. The Major ones are as follows:

• Subfolder access:
  Many of us prefer to organize the page into three divisions, namely Header, Body and Footer. We use #include to call these files. The issue however is when you work in a subfolder e.g. "support" and user #include "../header.asp" ,all the links of header.asp in this case will be converted with the current folder name in the path something like to www.4spots.com/support/profile.asp. However in reality profile.asp is in the root folder (i.e. www.4spots.com/profile.asp).
Giving absolute path will save the programmer of the entire headache. Absolute path won’t be translated like in the above case and www.4spots.com/profile.asp remains as it is.


• Content Reuse/Theft:
  Some people repost your articles in their sites; it may be worth using absolute links so you get some link credit/value out of them stealing your content. *wink* For e.g. if a link was stated as ./profile.asp, when copied it will not make any sense, as profile.asp of the new website will be looked up. At the same time, if www.4spots.com/profile.asp was the link in the content that is being copied, even if a person views your article in some other site, clicking on any of the links will bring them to your site.
  
  
• Hijacking: If any hacker tries to hijack your site and make a search engine think that your site exists at a different URL, many pages in your website will be available to these hackers if you use relative URLs.
  
  
• Canonical URL issues: One major concern faced by website owners is the issue of Canonical URLs. Canonical means “standard” or “authoritative”. A canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL, you want people to see. Sometimes if a domain is not setup properly, the domain URL (domain.com) and the www domain URL (www.domain.com) are considered to be individual web pages. That means, both the sites will get indexed by search engines as though they were different, not to mention splitting the link popularity. If the search engine decides that they index your site with domain.com and not www.domain.com, then you could suddenly lose all of your search engine rankings because the non-www version of your site is indexed and the www version is not and you don't have many links to the non-www version of your site

Now, don’t think we are undermining relative linking. “Practice the Middle Path without going to extremes; practice it in every aspect of your life.”- Buddha. Let’s apply that here. Using absolute linking through out the website can make the code heavy, implying longer download time. When deciding what type of links you wish to use on your site, always consider your site's visitors first and foremost. Download time does not affect search engine rankings, we know, but it does affect the visitors coming into your site.