Hi all,

Do search engines know the difference between absolute and relative links?

From what I understand, inbound links have the potential to increase your search engine ranking. What about internal (relative) links within your own website, for example Wikipedia has a gazillion relative links between their articles. Does this help Wikipedia get ranked higher?


Thanks in advance!

Absolute or relative linking does not affect the link quality and therefore no direct impact on ranking.

The problem only arises if you use absolute links and then switch your domain name... as you have to manually change all the absolute links whereas relative links would not need to be changed whatsoever (as long as the same structure was used).

I don't think relative linking really helps your rankings. Maybe the bots will find them more when they crawl your forums to get them indexed faster.

One thing with absolute, coralcdn urls won't work (nyud.net:8080). Coralcdn still is very beta, though.

Search engines know the difference and I'm sure it doesn't matter to them. Keep in mind, though, if you have content that will appear in an RSS feed, you don't want to use relative links because the user won't be reading the content from your domain.

Linking strategy should be absolute not relative.