Absolute of Relative Internal Website Links

[barnst]

Hi,

I am not sure what is considered best practice when linking between pages on the same site - absolute or relative:

Link

Or

Link

I notice a lot of CMS systems (WordPress) use the absolute method - is there a reason?

Any help much appreciated.

Barney.

[PeterAlexLeigh]

It doesn't really make much difference. Relative is useful for navigating when your web site is off line in the design stage, but it makes little difference.

If you were to put links in content, it's probably best to use absolute links, incase anyone scrapes your articles to replicate on their own site. Then at least you might gain an extra link back to your own site.

Please be aware that if you use several different types of links to navigate to your home page such as;

http://www.mysite.com/index.html

http://www.mysite.com/

Google and other search engines would count this as 2 different links and cause some duplication issues. So in that respect, I wouldn't refer to your home page's actual page my name. Just use the / either in an absolute or a relative sense.

[barnst]

Thanks for the answer!

[MattAaron]

Another reason for absolute would be that it prevents 404 errors if you forget to edit the rel links when you move pages around, add folders etc. One less thing to worry about.