Base href

[nvs.nim]

I'm having a discussion with a third party that's building a website for a client that I advised concerning his SEO.

The site went live 2 weeks ago and it's not getting indexed very well, so my client asked me what could be the problem.

I checked several things that could be the problem, like an xml sitemap that was missing etc. But there was another thing that I saw in the source code:

<base href="http://www.domain.com/">

Can this be a problem for Google to follow internal links? I always thought that you should use the base href like this:

<base href="http://www.domain.com"> so without the trailing / behind the TLD

And even better using absolute instead of relative links, no?

[GeorgeAndrews]

I suggest looking through previous Q&A forum results for various answers that have been provided for this question. Here's the query to find them: https://www.google.com/search?q=seomoz+base+href.

Basically, you are right, you should use absolute links instead of relative links. You only need to use a base href if you are using relative URLs on page and the base href is needed for them to resolve correctly.

The base href you are seeing in the code shouldn't be causing any issues for Google when following internal links. The issues, if any, would be caused by the relative links themselves if they are not set up correctly (this should be easily tested).