http://www.mysite.com/page2.htm internal links or page2.htm internal links.

With my website should i have internal links to other pages on my site as "http://www.mysite.com/page2.htm" or is it best to have the internal links as "page2.htm"

Does anyone know what is best for SEO or does it not matter?

 

Personnally i have all of my links as http://www.mysite.com/page2.htm
but i would give the page2 part an anchor text rather than just page2 i would use something relating to your keywords.

 

I find its better to use the full link for forward compatibility.

For example when I played about with htaccess then changed the links to usernames on my site to sitename.com/username instead of sitename.com/index.php?goto=memberpage&userid=123, I found that my 'page2.html' links went from sitename.com/page2.html to sitename.com/username/page2.html .

I didnt anticipate this originally and it meant that I had to edit hundreds of dynamically created links to fix the problem.

I dont think this will make a difference in the searc engines, but the bottom line is that you should always use the full link.

I hope that helped

 

An alternative URL would be '/page2.htm', i.e. with preceding /. Handy if you like to test your site on a test webserver. Disadvantage is that you can't previews your website on your own harddisk.

Cryo.

 

Well, you can always use "base href=" for that purpose (i.e. to specify the "root" directory), like for instance in this example below, which I took out of my own website's source.


The example of two such "base href=" lines:

<base href="http://tadej-ivan.50webs.com/" />

Code (markup):

<base href="http://tadej-ivan.50webs.com/legal/" />

Code (markup):

tayiper

 

Tayiper, I have never heard of the base href tag before but holy crap, that is awesome. I just did some research on it and that is absolutely great, thank you for pointing that out...

 

I've discovered that not all search engine bots or web browsers handle this correctly. My log files contain a smattering of 404 errors because of this. Not too many though...

Cryo.