The Debate Between Absolute Links and Relative Links in SEO
The debate between absolute links and relative links continues to be an ongoing debate in the SEO community. The individual significance of each type of link has been contested. but it is widely regarded that absolute links provide better search engine optimization value than a relative link.
For proper indexing of a website, certain functions are to be properly. These lead to the exact indexing and proper website crawling. The main point is to configure your website to be in the proper format, whether it is relative or absolute. The following gives a detail on each type of links and how each is suitable for particular industries and its goals
What is the Difference Between These Two Link Types?
Absolute Links – These links provide data that is available on the location of the page on the web. For example – https://yourdomain.com/about. The protocol (https) and its domain (www.yourdomain) can track all the nesting levels and measure the location of the page on your website.
Relative Links – These links provide the tag of the absolute URL. For example – if you are looking to link to a product page from a category page, then you need to use the relative html url – <a href = “product”>. There is a an assumption that when a relative link is found on a page, its exact page could be used as a root.
SEO Training: Why Relative Links are More Commonly Preferred
Effective Coding – Most web developers prefer the relative url path as it helps in making coding simpler. Instead of making the route as an outline. which is a time consuming and a tedious work, you can use the code “product” as it will be available at some place inside the website, under some category.
Can be easily shifted from stage to production – Relative URLs can make your shift easier to your complete your website to the production line. On doing so, tags in the addresses will be used in the new domain. This is considered to be one of the most effective methods of utilizing resources of the team.
Increase in speed of website loading – Since URLs are in short form, speed of pages are quick to be uploaded. But you cannot depend on relative links completely for the increase in speed. Sometimes your content could be lengthy and in such a case, you need to fix this serious issue quickly.
Removing risks – Use of relative URLs help shift from production to the staging environment. But it does with its twist. It makes it easier for your competition to access your websites data with and put it on their domain. This is immoral and illegal but people will stop at nothing to steal good content.
Even though relative links are easier and more comfortable to use, it does have its own drawback. One of the reasons you want to beware of relative links is its duplication issues. In case you are not choosing the canonical version of your websites domain, Google could use these as different unique versions. As algorithms within Google have gotten smarter it value these links on a separate scale. There are still chances of mistakes happening and so completely this cannot be trusted. If your website shows up as a duplicate page for your www.yourdomain.com Google search result and your yourdomain.com version, problems can evolve related to your contents originality.
Once you know the difference of both – relative links and absolute links and its purpose that it serves, it becomes easier to use them at the right place and at right time. Every method has its own advantages and disadvantages. Relative Links do make work of web developers simpler and easier whereas absolute links provide better security, solve duplication related issues don’t come up.
Many users are with the opinion that use of absolute links as one of the best SEO practices, but we cannot and completely accept that. We need to analyse and thoroughly know the pros and cons of each and then choose them based on our priorities and the goals. The main thing is we need to choose the format for the website that has less errors or risks associated for the development team and for the use of good Google Search results.
