301 redirect relative or absolute path?

[Silviu]

Hello everyone,

Recently we've changed the URL structure on our website, and of course we had to 301 redirect the old urls to the coresponding new ones.

The way the technical guys did this is:

"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html"
meaning as a relative redirect path, not an absolute one like this:
"http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com/new-url.html"

This happened for few thousands urls, and the fact is the organic traffic dropped for those pages after this change. (no other changes were made on these pages and the new urls are as seo friendly as possible, A grade on On-Page Grader).

The question is: does the relative redirect negatively affects seo, or it counts the same as an absolute path redirect?

Thanks,
S.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Silviu

There is always the possibility of some SEO value being lost when you implement a 301 redirection so that may be why you have seen a hit.

Have a look at Moz's information on this here...

Note this paragraph: A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. 301 refers to the HTTP status code for this type of redirect. In most instances, the 301 redirect is the best method for implementing redirects on a website.

One thing though, I have never seen relative redirection for the same domain written as "http://www.domain.com/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "/new-url.html" but always as "/old-url.html" 301 redirect to "http://www.domain.com//new-url.html". I'm not saying the other way wouldn't work - which if the links are working correctly when you follow them they clearly are - but just not seen that.

I hope the above helps,
Peter

[AriNahmani]

301 Redirects should always be programmed and thought of us relative to full path.

in htaccess, it should look like this:

redirect 301 /old-page-name.html http://www.full-website-name.com/new-page-name.html
redirect 301 /old-page-name2.html http://www.full-website-name.com/new-page-name2.html

and so on and so forth..

Which pages lost traffic - old ones or new ones? If you could send an example (or email it if you're willing) id be happy to take a peak.

[Silviu]

Thank you for the tip Ari, but our website is not using apache and htaccess, so the rules are written in another language, but I'm sure this is not important.

The http status of the old urls is 301 to the new relative paths /new-url.html
and this is where my problem is:
Should the destination url (the new one) be relative or absolute?

Silviu

[AriNahmani]

the destination URL should 100% be absolute!

[crackingmedia]

Hi Silviu

It is as Ari said - source URL is relative and destination URL is absolute.

Peter

[Silviu]

Thanks Ari!