In a recent blog post by Bing’s Webmaster Center team they write that you should use absolute URLs for internal links rather than relative URLs to get the full ‘link juice’. Sorry, what?
Microsoft Bing’s Webmaster Center team have certainly been busy recently, putting out a regular series of generally useful posts on issues pertinent to webmasters. One of their recent posts, however, contains some decidedly peculiar advice on the subject of absolute and relative URLs. I’ll reproduce the section in full here:
Choose between relative vs. absolute linksTo further emphasize your URL for ever more link juice, always use absolute URLs for internal links. What does this mean? It’s simple. Use the entire URL to point to the linked page rather than a file address that is relative to the home page of your site. For example, if your home page links to a page named contactus.htm stored in a directory named media, format the value for the href attribute to use the page’s full URL, as in
<a href="http://www.mysite.com/media/contactus.htm">Contact us</a>instead of the shorter, relative directory reference used for the page, as in
<a href="http://www.bing.com/media/contactus.htm">Contact us</a>.The use of absolute links reinforces the use of your full URL and, like canonicalization, focuses the link juice to that URL. External, inbound links have to do this to reach anything other than your home page. Why not contribute a little bit of your own effort in adding to the link juice for your internal webpages?
A quick note before I continue – it looks like there’s an error in their second example – it looks like it’s supposed to be a relative URL but it’s actually an absolute URL (quite possibly the author typed in a relative URL but their CMS automatically added the absolute path – given the subject of this post, this is somewhat ironic).
Whilst absolute and relative both have their pros and cons for a number of technical reasons, the differences are fairly insignificant. From the perspective of a web browser – or a search engine – it shouldn’t matter, both ways effectively point to exactly the same URL. Decoding relative URLs isn’t hard – it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of parsing HTML.
So why would Bing tell us that “The use of absolute links” “focuses the link juice to that URL”? Why should website owners need to use absolute URLs in internal links to (paraphrased) ‘add to the link juice for their internal webpages’? Surely they’re not telling us that the search engine which Microsoft is pouring billions into can’t understand something this simple?
The answer, I expect, is likely to be a simple case of Bing’s left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing – that is, the person who wrote this post is not the engineer who makes Bing understand web pages, and somewhere along the way wires got crossed.
Sure, search engines may suggest that people use absolute URLs because there’s less chance of accidental canonicalisation issues, but I think if webmasters check their server logs, they’ll see Microsoft Bing crawling their relative URLs just fine.
Tags: Microsoft
yvonh says:
July 3, 2009
My personal experience with relative path with Googlebot : i unfortunately had two pages that contained relative path to each other and it was enough to screw Googlebot, in fact the spider was trapped.
The result is I got url that look like this http://www.domain.com/pageA/pageB/pageA/pageB and so on until 6 months later I could find the guilty. 6 months the spider has been trapped!
I would like to reproduce this experience one day.
Ian Macfarlane says:
July 6, 2009
@yvonh – that’s a fairly common CMS issue, unfortunately many (probably most) CMS platforms are pretty badly written and do suffer from issues like this.
In addition to not creating pages with broken relative paths like this, the CMS should also not accept invalid URL paths, and should serve the standard 404 when these are encountered. Therefore, if you did have a situation whereby invalid URLs were created, you’d not have any invalid pages indexed by the search engines, and you could identify the 404′ing broken links via server logs/Google Webmaster Tools/a link crawler like Xenu/etc.
Pushpendra says:
December 1, 2009
I personally prefer absolute url .