I was checking one of my site's html, and I found one thing that can confuse search engines, <base href="[ URL ]" />. I just assumed that search engines only list pages that are linked from somewhere, but do they also list page defined in <base href="[ URL ]" /> html tag? Also do they think that <base href="[ URL ]" /> always points to home page? Related questions: q1. How did Google treat <base href="[ URL ]" /> tag in the past? q2. How did Google treat <base href="[ URL ]" /> tag currently? q3. How did Yahoo treat <base href="[ URL ]" /> tag in the past? q4. How did Yahoo treat <base href="[ URL ]" /> tag currently?
The BASE HREF should point to the base directory (with a trailing slash), not to a homepage (though these may be the same). If used correctly, this can help search engine bots get the right canonical URLs for every page on your site. The URL defined by the base tag probably doesn't count as a link. Examples: <HREF BASE="/directory/"> <HREF BASE="http://web.site.com/"> <HREF BASE="http://web.site.com/directory/"> HTML: Something that is close to what you describe would be: <LINK REL="index" HREF="http://web.site.com/homepage.html"> HTML: This and other similar REL tags are pretty new, and I don't think that many search engines make use of them yet. Cryo.