Hey there, I was wondering what is better to use - absolute or relative links? What are the advantages / disadvantages of both? Thanks for any information. Sincerely, Travis Walters
In terms of SE rankings, it does not matter if you use absolute or relative links. The search engines automatically convert relative links into an absolute links. the only advantage of using absolute link is that the shorter code can decrease a page's download time and less code means faster download time.
Somebody pointed their domain at mine and because it was all relative, it looked like all my pages were coming from their site. I think if I use absolute URLs, this would not happen as every link would link back to mine.
I found in the past that with some RSS readers, Bloglines in particular, it wasn't correctly resolving the relative link. It was trying to resolve itself to Bloglines.com and therefore 'page not found' errors. I'm not sure if Bloglines still behaves like this, I know Google Reader doesn't, so I decided to use absolute links. Purely from a programming perspective I'd much rather tinker with relative links as mass changes, if required, are far easier to accomplish than changing every absolute link.
It will not make much difference as long as you configure everything properly so that all links point to the same URL and not some to www. domain .com and others to domain . com
With a dynamic scripting language, it may be just as easy to store the domain name in a header file and then do something like: http://www.#myDomain#/us/md/cumberland.cfm