Base HREF set without HTTP. Will this cause search issues?

[Nebraska]

The base href has been set in the following format:

<base href="//www.example.com/">

I am working on a project where many of the programming team don't believe that SEO has an impact on a website. So, we often see some strange things. Recently, they have rolled out an update to the website template that includes the base href I listed above. I found out about it when some of our tools such as Xenu link checker - suddenly stopped working.

Google appears to be indexing the the pages fine and following the links without any issue - but I wonder if there is any long term SEO considerations to building the internal links in this manner?

Thanks!

[UnderRugSwept]

Is that code on every page or just the homepage?

[Nebraska]

They have put it on every page. The programming manager is quick to point out that according to W3C neither http nor https are required for proper links. I have just never seen anyone purposely make all internal links begin with double slashes (//). It certainly makes xenu die, but I am not sure if there is any downside other than xenu and a few other tools not working.

Thanks!

[Dr-Pete]

The W3C standards might allow for no protocol, but you would never just put "//" - that's part of the protocol ("http://", "https://", "ftp://", etc.). This usage is technically incorrect. It could cause minor issues on some browsers (although probably not on newer ones).

Does it matter for SEO? Well, that's a bit trickier. Google tend to ignore base href unless there are ambiguous relative URLs, like canonical tags that have no base URL and are unclear. Practically speaking, it's probably not a huge problem, but it is possible for it to cause issues down the road.

Either way, if it's on a sitewide template, it's a 5-minute job, and what they have is wrong. I'm not one to knock devs (I've been a dev and I've managed devs), but they need to stop arguing and just fix it.

[Nebraska]

Thanks for the comment. I was able to get them to make the changes, but I think I have made some new enemies. Oh well, I will move on in a few months anyhow.

Thanks again,

Joe