Print this article

Email to friend

Absolute Versus Relative Linking in Web Sites
Author: Bill Hartzer

What is an absolute link? What is a relative link? Why should you care which one you use? When it comes to how you set up the links on your web site, it's important to use an absolute link (which means that when you link to another page on your web site you specify the complete URL in the link like

http://www.yourdomain.com/page1.html). A relative link is when you have an internal link and you only specify the page URL and not the full URL in the link (for example, a relative link would be when you only link to page1.html). I'll tell you my search engine ranking horror story and exactly why you should use absolute linking on your web site. I would hate for your web site to suddenly lose all its search engine rankings just as I did one day--it's not fun.

 

Always use absolute links whenever you can. If you use relative links you can suddenly lose all of your rankings in the search engines--it has happened to me and was a nightmare for a few weeks until I got it all straightened out. All of a sudden one of my prized domain names stopped ranking in Google. I couldn't figure it out. Great rankings for several years and bad rankings all of a sudden. I finally searched for the domain name in Google and found that they had indexed the entire site without the www subdomain. I then found that there were a few links to the non-www version of the site. I figured out that because there were links to mydomain.com and because I was using relative links the search engine were allowed to spider the site thinking it was mydomain.com and not www.mydomain.com.

   ( Next Page )

Custom Website Design - 7 Steps to a More Professional Website (Author: Michael Turner)

If you are trying to sell a product or service on your website, then it is important to make your site as professional as possible. You might think designing that your own website to look like a professional ...

Web Design & Graphics (Author: Steven Fraser)

Graphics are an important part of web design but require serious thought and planning. Many websites I see suffer from the same problem. The graphics make the page look unattractive and ...

How To Find A Web Designer (Author: Richard Hill)

Website Design Info - Part 4 Finding A Web Designer by Richard F. Hill © 2005 Richard F. Hill - All Rights reserved This is the fourth of eight articles about website design. Our discussion ...

The dawn of digital printing (Author: Karen Nodalo)

Printing has been made affordable for use these days and the dawn of the new printing age today have ruled over the traditional way of offset printing. Digital printing has been increasing their popularity ...

Branding through Logo Design (Author: Harris Jhosta)

The preliminary lack of customers and abrupt cash flows often causes new small business owners to put off designing a well made logo and promotion resources professionally "until they achieve a clientele" ...

Search for:


In:
Title Authors Keywords

E-mail address:


Name: