![LBi: online brand positioning [link:LBi Home Page]](http://www.lbi-netrank.co.uk/images/design/lbi-netrank-logo.gif "LBi: online brand positioning"){kind=logo}
Home |
About Us |
Working With You |
Our Services |
Our News |
Blog |
Contact Us
ArchiveTag Cloudacquisitions antitrust ask browsers canonical christmas google international keywords language marketing microsoft online advertising pagerank personalised search redirects research search spam yahoo! SubscribeIf you would like to be alerted when someone posts to the blog please enter your email address below. RSS 2.0 Feed
|
Bing says relative URLs pass less link juicePosted on 3rd July 2009 at 4:00 pm by Ian Macfarlane In a recent blog post by Bing's Webmaster Center team they write that you should use absolute URLs for internal links rather than relative URLs to get the full 'link juice'. Sorry, what? Microsoft Bing’s Webmaster Center team have certainly been busy recently, putting out a regular series of generally useful posts on issues pertinent to webmasters. One of their recent posts, however, contains some decidedly peculiar advice on the subject of absolute and relative URLs. I’ll reproduce the section in full here: Choose between relative vs. absolute linksA quick note before I continue – it looks like there’s an error in their second example – it looks like it’s supposed to be a relative URL but it’s actually an absolute URL (quite possibly the author typed in a relative URL but their CMS automatically added the absolute path - given the subject of this post, this is somewhat ironic). Whilst absolute and relative both have their pros and cons for a number of technical reasons, the differences are fairly insignificant. From the perspective of a web browser – or a search engine – it shouldn’t matter, both ways effectively point to exactly the same URL. Decoding relative URLs isn’t hard – it’s one of the most fundamental aspects of parsing HTML. So why would Bing tell us that “The use of absolute links” “focuses the link juice to that URL”? Why should website owners need to use absolute URLs in internal links to (paraphrased) ‘add to the link juice for their internal webpages’? Surely they’re not telling us that the search engine which Microsoft is pouring billions into can’t understand something this simple? The answer, I expect, is likely to be a simple case of Bing’s left hand not knowing what its right hand is doing – that is, the person who wrote this post is not the engineer who makes Bing understand web pages, and somewhere along the way wires got crossed. Sure, search engines may suggest that people use absolute URLs because there’s less chance of accidental canonicalisation issues, but I think if webmasters check their server logs, they’ll see Microsoft Bing crawling their relative URLs just fine. 3 CommentsPosted on 6th July 2009 at 8:36 am by Ian Macfarlane
@yvonh - that's a fairly common CMS issue, unfortunately many (probably most) CMS platforms are pretty badly written and do suffer from issues like this. Posted on 1st December 2009 at 5:32 am by PushpendraI personally prefer absolute url . Post Your CommentSubscribeIf you would like to be alerted when there are new comments to read please enter your email address below. RSS 2.0 Feed
|
Posted on 3rd July 2009 at 6:58 pm by yvonh
My personal experience with relative path with Googlebot : i unfortunately had two pages that contained relative path to each other and it was enough to screw Googlebot, in fact the spider was trapped.
The result is I got url that look like this http://www.domain.com/pageA/pageB/pageA/pageB and so on until 6 months later I could find the guilty. 6 months the spider has been trapped!
I would like to reproduce this experience one day.