Relative Links Or Absolute?

[keithlunt]

I've always used relative links (e.g. page.html) because testing locally on the computer before publishing these links work. But is there any search engine benefit of using absolute links (http://www.sitename.co.uk/page.html)?

The reason I'm asking is that on a couple of sites I'm really struggling to get internal pages page ranked consistently. I've got sites with home pages PR4, where the pages linked to from the home page don't have a PR, but are cached and have been for months / years. On one site it seems to be random whether the sub pages get a PR. It's driving me nuts - any ideas to look at are welcomed!

[An Oasis]

Tried both - no difference.

I think that that internal pages are considered "poor" by the SE's if they are not included in the main menu. We are about to implement a series of SE friendly drop down menus in order to solve the problem.

[fisicx]

Do you want ranking or PR? Althought they are linked, there seems to be a continual confusion over the two.

PR is an internal google measure of the importance of a page. A simplified version of this PR is displayed on the google toolbar (TBPR).

Ranking is your position in the results page for each keyword or keyphrase.

It is therefore possible to have a TBPR of 0 but a good ranking. Conversely you could have a TBPR of 4 but not appear on the top 100.

I would forget all about TBPR, concentrate instead on building up traffic to those internal pages. As to the google cache, if they determine that there is nothing new on the page which adds value to the visitor then they won't reindex the page and your cache will stay the same.

Relative or absolute links make no difference, the search engines automatically convert them all to absolute (look at the SERPs - no relative links).

[fisicx]

Originally Posted by oasis

I think that that internal pages are considered "poor" by the SE's if they are not included in the main menu.

Not true. All the SE requires is the means to reach each page via a series of text links. They maybe considered poor because of the page content but there is no reason why a deep page cannot rank well despite not having a direct link to the home page.

Make sure you do a lot of user testing before you launch your drop downs. One method is to put a link on your old homepage to the 'new site' and allow visitors to explore. You might be surprised at the results,take particular note on how they navigate.

[shaunudal]

I think you should start working on your Internal pages, like directory submission, internal linking, articles submission etc. it can help your internal pages to get ranking on SERPS.

Shaun

Originally Posted by keithlunt

I've always used relative links (e.g. page.html) because testing locally on the computer before publishing these links work. But is there any search engine benefit of using absolute links (http://www.sitename.co.uk/page.html)?

The reason I'm asking is that on a couple of sites I'm really struggling to get internal pages page ranked consistently. I've got sites with home pages PR4, where the pages linked to from the home page don't have a PR, but are cached and have been for months / years. On one site it seems to be random whether the sub pages get a PR. It's driving me nuts - any ideas to look at are welcomed!