Relative or absolute links in html?

[binba]

My inner links in my website are almost all relative inside my domain.
I wonder if making them absolute (using my domain name) would make them rate higher on google?
Anyone had experience with this issue?

[shakir]

I do not thing so, for Google al the links will be absolute.. and internal links not having much rating on Google. only the external links counts more

[maneetpuri]

Hi,

According to my experience in this field if you will see your back links given by google you can find pages from your domain also, that means google do give importance to the back links from your domain if they are optimized well.

Thanks!

Maneet Puri

[Feydakin]

Relative and literal links make no difference when it comes to SEO..

[seosean]

Originally Posted by shakir

I do not thing so, for Google al the links will be absolute.. and internal links not having much rating on Google. only the external links counts more

Internal links DO have an affect in Google and are counted on it's PageRanking/rating system. Your page will page PageRank to all links that are dofollow on that page regardless if it's internal or not.

[Papoloko]

A couple of years ago I Tested that on one of my sites. Setup link to all inner pages from the home page. Main page PR went lower and inner page got higher. Some of them became the same PR as the home page. I didn't like it though!

[wige]

My understanding of spider behavior is that it doesn't matter if an internal link is relative or absolute - the spider will convert the link to whatever form it uses regardless of the links format on the page. I seem to remember on an old blog from Matt Cutts saying it doesn't matter, but I couldn't find the link so I could be wrong. I have seen the issue raised a few times on Google's boards and the answer has always been that it doesn't make a difference.

However, there is one important caveat. If you are using relative links, you must make sure there are absolutely no canonicalization issues on your site. One of the biggest ways for these issues to be magnified is Google crawling the wrong version of a page, and then indexing a series of relative links that are on the wrong form of the subdomain.

For full disclosure, I generally use FQDNs for my internal links. Personally I find them easier to manage when dealing with dynamic sites and dynamic templates.

[chandrika]

Another reason for using absolute links including your full domain, is if you ever have problems with site scrapers. Using absolute links can deter scrapers, as they can not just copy your entire content to their domain, they would have to change all the absolute links as well, to include their own domain.

[Leonle]

I know it is an old thread to reply.But this thread really helped me.

[full house]

using absolute links is far more comfortable than relative. . . we are more comfortable with that.

[sushil]

according to me only back link effect the google rank. I don't think that internal link will effect the pr.

[Monicakidman]

Originally Posted by sushil

according to me only back link effect the google rank. I don't think that internal link will effect the pr.

For the SEO internal links are also affect more in the search engine result also. If you have inner links related with your pages than it will help. Else not related inner links may harm your result.