Internal Linking To Your Homepage, Have I been doing this wrong for years? Options

[Dave]

I read an interesting bit of advice in an email from Marketing Sherpa from Stone Reuning of SEO Advantage, Inc. In it Stone says:

When you link to your index page in different ways, the search engines treat each as a separate page. For example, if you link to your index page with www.domain.com/index.htm in one place and www.domain.com in another place, search engines do not recognize this as two links to the same page.

This I understand. But it got me thinking... my internal linking to my homepage (and other important pages) is consistant, but relative to the site root, for example href="/index.asp". However, I rank best in the SEs for "http://www.mydomain.co.uk" (as his is what people link to).

My question for everyone today is: should I change all of my internal homepage links to be absolute links - href="http://www.mydomain.co.uk"? In fact, should I change all of my links from relative links like href="/dir1/dir2/page.asp" to absolute links like href="http://www.mydomain.co.uk/dir1/dir2/page.asp"?

[OldWelshGuy]

I know I and many others here recommend absolute linking i.e www.domain.com/page.htm etc . Google also recommend absolute linking as it prevents canonical issues like the www. and non www. problem.

Also keep in mind that it is possible (and workable) to have both an index.htm and index.php etc in the root folder.

Absolute is absolutely best (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Dave]

Thanks James.

[linux_lover]

I thought it was the Anchor text rather than the HREF that Google counted, am I wrong in thinking that?

[Nueromancer]

I know I and many others here recommend absolute linking  i.e www.domain.com/page.htm etc . Google also recommend absolute linking as it prevents canonical issues like the www. and non www. problem.

Also keep in mind that it is possible (and workable) to have both an index.htm and index.php etc in the root folder.

Absolute is absolutely best (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

yeh but having absolute links in your code is a compeate Bitch for developing the site
it makes moving from dev->test->live realy dificult as you are HARD Coding he structure into the code.

[linux_lover]

I agree totally with that - you could maybe get round it by storing your domain in a var and appending it if 'www' is in the request.

CODE

stristr ($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], "www") ? $domain = "http://www.mydomain.com" : $domain = "localhost"));

print ("<a href='$domain/page.php'>Some page</a>");

Or something like that..

[dave_g]

yeh but having absolute links in your code is a compeate Bitch for developing the site 
it makes moving from dev->test->live realy dificult as you are HARD Coding he structure into the code.

If you were a customer I wouldn't suggest changing all the links. I might suggest using absolute links in the site map and relative for the rest if it were not a king sized website. How much of an SE pop is such algo chasing going to get you versus the development and maintenance hassles? Just my 2 cents.

[Randy]

There are a lot of ways to approach it.

Personally, I tend to use absolute urls. However this is personal preference.

The www/non-www issue is one to watch out for, but can be handled at the server level pretty easily.

So if you have the www/non-www issue under control you can certainly use referential linking. One thing I would recommend however is that you link back to index pages as simply <a href="/"> rather than as <a href="index.html"> since it'll help cure the search engines confusion and also help down the road if you ever decide to change from .html to .php or .php to .asp, etc.

[Jill]

I thought it was the Anchor text rather than the HREF that Google counted, am I wrong in thinking that?

They still follow and index the URLs though.

If you were a customer I wouldn't suggest changing all the links. I might suggest using absolute links in the site map and relative for the rest if it were not a king sized website. How much of an SE pop is such algo chasing going to get you versus the development and maintenance hassles? Just my 2 cents.

Umm...how is that algo chasing?

It's unfortunate that in 2006 the search engines can't tell the difference between www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/index.htm until it's been around many years.

But it's reality. Until they get smart enough to figure it out, it's good practice to work around it by making sure you only use one form on your internal and external links.

[wilko92]

Hang on a minute, a few weeks ago Iposted a thread on relative and absolute links which received a resounding "It just doesn't matter which you use" response.

This thread would suggest that there is a difference!

[Jill]

No, sorry for the confusion. Absolute and relative, for the most part don't matter. But when it comes to making sure you link to each page of your site by only one specific URL and always keep it the same, that does matter.

If you use absolute URLs you'll be sure to do just that, but there are plenty of other ways to do it as well, even with relative URLs. Just don't link to it via index.html or whatever.

[harry_wales]

Jill's right. The method you choose doesn't matter. What does matter is that whatever method you choose, you stick to it right throughout your site.

[ttw]

This is an interesting discussion, but is it not the case that how you link to your homepage from within your site really doesn't impact the SE ranking of that page very much -- what does impact it is how other sites link to your homepage. You want them to all link to your page the same way. Typically you don't have much control over exactly how others code their links to your homepage.

So... why not set up a 301 redirect that sends a relative link to the absolute path? What would that look like?

[Jill]

This is an interesting discussion, but is it not the case that how you link to your homepage from within your site really doesn't impact the SE ranking of that page very much -- what does impact it is how other sites link to your homepage.

Nope. How you link to it within your own site matters very much.

[Talie]

ok, I'm new here and all but I just encountered something interesting with one of the sites I'm working for along the lines of such a topic.

The fact that all the backlinks linking to the homepage are in .com , when you reach the homepage that has /homepage.php the page rank is a big 0. I just advised the programmer to get rid of the /homepage.php

is /index something different? Someone said Google doesn't recognise the difference b/w the url names...could that be true?