Different ways of creating internal links

[ArtB]

Hi

Is there any difference from SEO point of view, between ways of creating internal links on a website:

1.Link to page (http://www.domain.com/folder/page.html)
2.Link to page (/folder/page.html)

I have some old pages with high PR, which have links to new pages, and I’m wondering which way of creating links is better.

[Chris]

always use static links for search engine purposes. never, never, never use relative.

[ArtB]

Just to be sure: do you mean static link = absolute link?

[incrediblehelp]

I agree if your starting from scratch that absolute is the best. However if the website has been built and relative URLs are needed because content is moved from development servers to live servers you can live with it. I have maintained at least a few clients that "needed" to us relative and we have ranked fine.

With that being said I still greatly prefer absolute. One thing the search engines have said before that you be consistent with one or the other. Do not use both on your website.

[seorocks]

but how do you update your site if you had 100's of pages and you needed to change the name of the url? also how do you test it?

[incrediblehelp]

but how do you update your site if you had 100's of pages and you needed to change the name of the url? also how do you test it?

What do you mean by "update"?

[covingtonscustoms]

If i had hundreds of pages that all need the same code changes, i would use dreamweaver to find and replace every instance of that code on every page in the local folder all at once then upload the changed pages to the server.

[seorocks]

i forgot about dreamweaver and it's ability to do that :) thanks.

[Manpasand]

I always prefer relative link ()

BTY I don't think it does matter but whatever you use link type(either absolute or relative) it should be same in whole site.

[saxman1973]

Google implies that it likes absolute links.
When any search engine crawls your site and reads your internal links if they see absolute links they index it as if you have an external link going to your site, which in turn give you a higher ranking. All the proof you need is to look at the PR of your default or index page and then go to another page of your site and click on your return home button (or what have you). If you use a relative link (../default.asp) you'll see your PR drop. If you use an absolute link (http://www.mydomain.com) you'll see that you're PR remains the same. Of course you can only do this on your IE6 test browser if you have already updated to IE7. By the way VISTA IS USELESS. STAY WITH XP!!!

[incrediblehelp]

By the way here is where Google hints (http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35156&hl=en) about absolute over relative.


Where possible, use absolute rather than relative links. (For instance, when linking to another page in your site, link to www.example.com/mypage.html rather than simply mypage.html).