Absolute Links vs. Relative Links – SEO Value

Business advice, SEO

As a lot of differences have come up on the usage of types of links, it has become common to ask on what kind of links should be used in the SEO territory that would be salubrious. Most neophytes get confused about linking to other websites and pages. It ain’t that hard to create links whether it is an absolute or a relative one. You can find best practices between absolute links and relative links still continuing to live on in the world of SEO. It has been universally accepted that cardinal connections have less potential for getting deflected when web crawlers record your webpage. It generally doesn’t get effected, yet among several reasons this is enough. Besides, content beefers might “repurpose” your substance. In that case, a legitimate back-connection should be credited to your site. This situation favors complete connections. In spite of the fact that this is a minor contention, it’s still justified even despite considering. In this blog lets share a fair knowledge of the two links, how to use them, the pros and cons and the differences between them.

ABSOLUTE LINK:

An absolute link is a link where the URL and filename can be found any where from the web and not just from a single website. It specifies a fully-qualified URL where the protocol must be present including a domain name, with a file name often as well. For instance: <ahref=”http://cosmowhiz.wpengine.com/

index.htm”>Go to CosmoWhiz</a>

The URL in this link can be browsed to regardless of where one starts.

It’s important to remember that a URL should include a protocol (in this case, http://). Even though the links may work on the computer without the http:// protocol being spelled out, it should include it anyway — for people whose computers don’t understand that a web address should have http:// in front of it.

Here are some examples of absolute link paths:

http://www.abc.com
http://www.abc.com/graphics/image.png
http://www.abc.com/help/articles/what-is-absloute-link.html

RELATIVE LINK:

Link that specifies the name of the file to be linked to only as it is related to the current document is a relative link. For example, if all the files in your Web site are contained within the same directory (or folder), and you want to establish a link from page1.html to page2.html, the code on page1.html will be: <a href=”page2.html”>Go to page 2</a>

This link will only be valid from within the same directory that page2.html is saved in. Relative links, and their paths, can be tricky. For example, imagine that page1.html is in the root directory (or main folder) and page2.html is in a subdirectory named folder2. In that case, a link from page1.html to page2.html would be coded:

<a href=”folder2/page2.html”>Go to page 2</a>

Here are some examples of relative link paths:

index.html
/graphics/image.png
/help/articles/what-is-relative-link.html

The very first difference between the two different types of links is that absolute paths always includes the domain name of the website, including http://www., whereas relative links only point to a file or a file path. When a user clicks a relative link, the browser takes them to that location on the current site. For that reason, you can only use relative links when linking to pages or files within your site, and you must use absolute links if you’re linking to a location on another website. An absolute link defines a specific location of the web file or document including: the protocol to use to get the document, the server to get it from, the directory it is located in, and the name of the document itself. Below is an example of an absolute link: <a href=”http://www.domain.com/pagename.html”></a>

The less than sign (<) opens the tag.
The “a” means anchor.
The “href” specifies the location of a web resource.
The entire URL (http://, the domain name, directory names-if used, and file names).
The greater than sign (>) closes the tag.

With a relative link, the search engine spiders and browsers already know where the current document is located. Thus, if you link to another document in the same directory, you will not need to write out the full URL. Only the filename is necessary. Below is an example of a relative link:

P.S. The domain name or the http://www is not included in this type of link.

PROS AND CONS:

Absolute URLs are when you link a URL by using the domain.com portion as well, so linking to blog page would be a link like http://cosmowhiz.wpengine.com/blog.php . The relative URL for that blog page would be a link like /blog.php. There are pros and cons to both absolute and relative URLs in links:

Absolute URLs: If someone tried copying your content then it helps keeping the links pointing to your content. It helps to keep the links pointing to your domain name if you cannot select a magisterial. It makes sure that you point to the correct URL even if you move things around. It cannot be tested on a staging / testing server unless you insert the links dynamically. It makes it hard to move content unless the links are inserted dynamically.

Relative URLs: It makes it easy to move content around and easy to test locally and on a staging server. They are easy to break if linking to content that isn’t moved as well such as stylesheets, graphics, etc. These are evil scrapers that would have less work.

Which format of link is better for searchers/search engines? Which type of link is better for getting search engine rankings: an absolute or a relative link? I, personally tend to use relative links until a client prefers using absolute links although absolute links are recommended to be used for several positive reasons. I use relative link as the shorter code would decrease a page’s real download time – less code means a faster download time. You can use any link type you are more comfortable using. However, when I optimize PDF files as with PDFs, I always use absolute links. If you distribute content via RSS feeds, then you should use absolute links. It’s always good to be consistent with internal linking, and it’s regular practice would make sure that all of the internal links would specify exactly the domain name of the website so that no question of which pages should be indexed arise. Use Absolute linking methods for the following reasons:

They are much easier to manage as there is less chance of broken links appearing when moving documents or pages around.
There are many more occurrences of your full domain name in the source code, which can only be good.
They are much more recognizable to your visitors who are then more likely to bookmark your site.
Search engines can’t miss or mess up any links when crawling your site.

In terms of SEO visibility, it does not matter what you use – absolute or relative links on your webpage. The search engines axiomatically convert relative links into absolute links. However, using absolute links will not make a site rank higher merely because webmasters choose to use absolute links on their sites. When you decide what type of link you prefer to use on your site, always consider your page’s visitors foremost. A page’s actual download time affects its sales conversions rather than its search engine rankings. Using too many absolute links on your web pages can have a negative impact on actual download time. A few particulars on a web page might be good for site usability and sales conversions, but they wouldn’t make any difference as to whether a site ranks or not. Although link structure is of great importance for the commercial web search engines to gain easy access to the content on your web pages, using absolute links instead of relative links will not suddenly make your site rank well.