Absolute & Relative Links How Do They Rank?

By Martin Lemieux
Posted Monday, June 28, 2004

The question for this article is whether or not you
should use "absolute url's" or "relative url's"? Not
only that, this article researches whether or not
Google ranks these methods differently.

Absolute: You use the entire url pointing to the
designated page.
ex. (www.yoursite.com/page1/index.html)

Relative: You use an automatic path to the file
ex. /page1/index.html

Relative gives a path that is "assumed". Your browser
will automatically "assume" to put (www.yoursite.com)
before the link.

When researching these two methods, I used 4 factors
to consider:

1) 20 Different popular search terms
2) Top 20 listings
3) Top 10 "Inbound Links" for pages within the site
4) Relative/Absolute urls NOT images

So here's the results of this study:

1- The average results within the 20 search terms had
a ratio of: Absolute 40% / Relative 60%

2- The average inbound links for each site I researched
had a ratio of: Absolute %50 / Relative 50%

So it seems safe to say that Google doesn't
necessarily rank "absolute/relative" paths
differently.

Google may recognize the fact that neither method is
wrong, it only reflects the designers preference.

There's only 1 type of Absolute and Relative paths that
get a bad rank. Web sites that use "tracking url's" or
data base urls get a significant reduction in page
rank emmediately.

The easiest way to notice this in action is to go to
(www.pogo.com) (Online games). You would think that pogo
has a great rank but nope, in fact their main page
rank is 0/10. This happens because every time google
crawls through their url, the site is different.

So if you care about page rank, keep your url's the
same as the day your site was born!

About The Author:

Martin Lemieux is leading the field online for web
design and online advertising. Visit his company right
away for many marketing tips & strategies:
(http://www.smartads.info)