Hi, I am sure that this question has been asked before, but I just don’t seem to find it. First, I often read that it is very important that you have many internal links, (links to yourself within the site). Why is it so important? And also, my site was designed 'off-line' first, so the home page would then be http://localhost/ to make design life easier I use the more generic "../somedir/somepage.html" So that regardless what the site is called all my links work, (with all major browsers in any case). But assuming your website is http://www.example.com, should I replace my "../" with a http://www.example.com. Or do most search robots know how to craw "../" back up the directory. Is it better for internal links to have "http://www.example.com/somepage.html" or "../somepage.html" or does it not matter? Thanks FFMG
Personally I prefer working from the site root, so I use a simple "/folder/page.htm" method. I don't think the ../ matters to the search engines though. I'm not sure about using the whole URL - and how that affects searchengine results. Good question. Personally, as I use templates and includes from all over the shop, it gets confusing for me when there's lots of ../../ on my links.
I've read on many sites that when interlinking you should use the full URL rather that ../index.html etc.
This is not something that has ever been proved I use both....when it is important to "stress" the keyword/allintext/allintitle/allinurl connection then I use the full site domain where it is an url that contains the keyword/s, otherwise I do not waste the time....except where using headers/footers that can sometimes be in folders deep down but then that is a practical point not one concerning the searcg engines!
If you use absolute URLs, then it's a lot harder to steal your site - I've caught people creating illegal copies of my sites before now, because of finding links from theirs to mine before they had chance to modify the URLs.
This is a very interesting question. Absolute or relative URLs? I have all absolute on my site because the main KW is in the domain name and I have read in some places that it gives you backlinks. BUT - as PR flows more on internal links, will the SEs know then that they are internal?