Links to internal pages

[saghir69]

ok just wondering if there is any difference between "/page_name.htm" and "mydomain.com/page_name.htm" in the eyes of search engines.


are they both same or one methord is better then the other?

[KarenDawn]

It's the actual page name that count's, not the path. Also make sure you are using good keywords in you page names.

[bhartzer]

Technically, there's not any difference. It should point to the same page in most cases. This is called the absolute path versus the relative path to a file.

For optimization purposes, it's better to specify the full url in all your links, even if it's a path to an image. There are many reasons why, including:
- to prevent domain hijacking
- to prevent indexing problems (if you have more than one domain pointing to content then it can get really messy really quickly)
- to prevent an accidental change in PageRank being applied to the wrong page. (domain.com/index.html is different than www.domain.com/index.html).
- to prevent dns hijacking of a site
- to prevent pagejacking

Whatever you do, be consistent. If you use relative paths then use it throughout the site. I recommend, though, that you always specify the full path of the url.