What is the best way for SEO to create your links in your navigation menu? For instance I have a site about fishing. My NAV MENU has the following topics. Fishing poles, Fishing Lures. Each is a link to the appropriate section. Is it better for the link to point to the file like fishing-lures.htm or is it better for the link to point to the whole URL like http://www.mydomain.com/fishing-lures.htm? Thanks
You can just link to the page, it's called using relative URLs and it will work fine (and is the proper way to link). Pointing to the entire URL is called absolute URLs and is a bad practice.
If you ever want to move the pages/change the link structure of the site, you have to go back and edit every single Absolute URL. Whenever we launch a website we code it on a staging server, and if we used absolute URLs we would have to edit all of them before we could move it into production. Plus, relative URLs are shorter. You can save a few k in file size when using a lot of links on your site.
Sorry, I disagree. For SEO you want to use the absolute URL. This will help you avoid canonical issues and insure that PR and link text is always passed to the proper pages. In addition, it will help you avoid duplicate content created by scrapers because all the scraped pages will point back to your site.
Itcn, freelistfool is right. You want to use the absolute URL in your links for exactly the reasons he mentioned. In addition, if you've planned out your site's architecture and have made provisions for it to grow, you won't have to worry about moving pages around as much, if at all, when it comes time to modify your site.
While I would certainly agree that the chance you are ever going to move all your pages to a new structure or new domain is minimal, I disagree that relative URLs have any negative impact on SEO. I have used a couple different internal link structures and have never used Absolute URLs, always relative, and have obtained plenty of good results. I would ask, nay, I would throw down the proverbial guantlent and challenge you to show me where absolute URLs helped a site moreso than relative URLs in a linking structure. My argument is that I'm pretty sure the google spider knows what domain it's indexing, it doesn't need you to remind it. Especially if you're pointing all your URLs to a canonical address.
Well, I will trust your experience but I still believe, coming up from coding in the 90s, that Absolute URLs from a design and site architecture perspective are simply a bad practice.
No disrespect intended, but do you really think '90s style coding practices are even practical in this day and age? Things change.
This is an interesting topic. What would be the opinion on Menu Items to use Absolute URL's also? The fact is that both points are valid, and really before your pursue with either choice you must decide whether there is a distinct possiblity that you may need to change the structure in the future. If not then I guess there is no real disadvantages to using the Absolute URL's. AFAIK many software's are able to cope with changing the nature of absolute URL's within an entire site anyhow.
None taken, but some things you learn with age and experience. I've been coding for 10 years and have never met a single coder until now who even suggested using Absolute URLs without, let's say, raising a few eyebrows
Well, i am not doing any coding stuffs, all you need to have for seo purpose your website unique, fresh and rich content. That's enough...
From my perspective complete absolute URL's are just a waste of bandwidth. The only arguement I could see for their use is the whole SEO thing - and frankly there isn't a search engine DUMB ENOUGH not to be able to figure out a relative URL, so on that count the 'complete' absolute URL is just bullshit. That said, I avoid 'up-tree' relative URL's like they were the plague. A well designed website should use relative URL's that always point 'down tree'. In other words, you should NEVER have to use '../' in a url on your site. That means - stylesheet in the root or if you put the stylesheet in a subdirectory all HTML files should be up-tree from it, and any images/files the stylesheet calls should be down-tree or in the same directory. Since I don't really deal in flat HTML pages anymore, my normal directory structure is thus: / - root directory, the only thing here is settings.php and index.php, with all requests sent via rewriterule to index.php. If I was making a flat page all HTML files and possibly the CSS would be here. /images - This directory contains only CONTENT images that would be common to all themes. /sources - sub PHP files that access the database /scripts - javascripts. Because javascript executes from the location of the HTML or master index.php, you don't have to worry about up-tree calls. /themes/themename - In a cms, the location of all php code that outputs HTML, as well as the CSS file for that theme, and any .htc files the theme requires. On a flat page I will often put the CSS here anyways to allow at least some base theming. (you write the HTML correctly you should be able to reskin using just the CSS ANYWAYS) /themes/themename/images - Because CSS DOES treat it's location as the root directory for calling other files, any images we want to call from the theme CSS goes in a subdirectory of the theme to avoid up-tree linking. This has the advantage that it makes the separation of presentation from content much more clearly defined. Using this structure, I never have to say /location, or ../location, much less waste bandwidth bloating out the code with full on url's. Using the full URL in a link, so called 'absolute' URL's is akin to putting a title tag on an anchor that is identical to the content OF the anchor. Freaking retarded... Yet you see SHIT CMS systems like Turdpress and Boomla do it all the damned time for no fathomable reason...
I totally agree with you, deathshadow, and you know your stuff, but you are the angriest seo on the internet
He's not an SEO, he's a programmer with over 30 years experience (but I won't go much further into that). And he also forgot one thing - content scrapers who'll just rip everything off of one page and slap it into their own site without thinking of reformatting the code to point the links back to their own sites. If finding these idiots by watching your own server logs (since Google's pretty damn good about filtering out duplicate content it finds) and then hitting them, their Web hosts (who'll blindly comply since they don't want to get sued by you) and the search engines with DMCA takedown notices isn't an advantage to using absolute URLs, then I don't know what is.
Ok dan, I'll concede that - you came up with a reason that holds water... Though I think that shows a difference in the types of clients you and I handle... and it certainly has less to do with SEO and more to do with slapping around retards. ... and itcn - I'm a New Englander born and bred - we are NOT a friendly people. "Ya caan't get theyah from heeyah" isn't a joke, it's a way of life. When something is wrong, or stupid, you tell someone it's wrong and stupid, to their face, and SAY WHY. (If you can't say why, THEN you need to STFU) Otherwise they'll never now just how wrong and just how stupid it is. There's too much feel good namby-pamby tofu-eating vegetable loving limp wristed californian rose-coloured glasses handling of the rubbish out there when it comes to ripping apart things that frankly, deserve to be ripped apart. God forbid anyone ever say something negative. Can you tell I'm a Simon Cowell Fan? Or that I consider the "Master of Smarm" Rowan Atkinson to be completely wasted playing annoying twits like Mr. Bean? (seriously he's about as entertaining in the role of Bean as Charlie Chaplin.) Bob, take a telegram: 'Mr. C. Chaplin, Sennett Studios, Hollywood, California. Congrats. Stop. Have found only person in world less funny than you. Stop. Name Baldrick. Stop. Yours E. Blackadder. Stop.' Oh, and put a P.S.: 'Please, please, please. Stop.'
Well, he's got me there - I'm a programmer with only 12 years professional experience, but my treatise on RDBMS normalization is still being using for the MIS degree at Harvard, so my ideas aren't completely outdated yet Dan, you have opened my eyes with another reason for using absolute URLs, although I also have never had a problem with anyone scraping my clients' content. I suppose, like anything else, there's more than one way to skin a cat, and there are instances where either relative or absolute URLs may be useful. I'll still never use them, but knock yourself out And deathshadow, more power to you for being honest and straightforward. I'm from New Jersey, where "F&$* you a$$hole" is also no joke, it's our state motto, often accompanied by our state bird.... our hatred for all things foreign is paralleled only by the ignorance of our state government. But mostly we hate the Sox and the Pats. And I used to watch the Blackadder shows on PBS 13 when I was in high school, way back when the Young Ones were on and music videos were played on MTV.