Why Absolute URLs are Better than Relatve URLs for Blogs

[Halfdeck]

According to Vanessa Fox, an ex-Googler, absolute urls (e.g. "http://www.domain.com/index.html") are better than relative urls (e.g. index.html) for two reasons:

1. Easier for Google to resolve canonicalization (non-www vs www; one common cause of site problems). Inconsistent urls (some urls pointing to "www.example.com" and some pointing to "http://example.com" can still sometimes make Google think you got 2 sites instead of one; and those 2 sites will rank lower than if you only had one site because you're splitting backlinks).
2. You get link juice when your blog posts get scraped (you already knew that, right?)

A quote by Vanessa in the same blog post regarding internal link structure (irrelevant but I don't wanna start a new thread):

My experience has been that if you have 10 pages on your site, all about the same topic, but those pages are scattered in various directories and randomly linked, those pages are just as likely to rank for the topic as they would if they were all grouped into one directory and linked categorically together. The important things seem to primarily be things like keywords on the page, anchor text, and relevant links.

More general blogging / SEO tips here.

[LowryBigwood]

This might be a stupid question, but hey... what the hell.

What if someone used relative and absolute linking on their non blog, regular website? Does Google know this is the same site, or would this cause unwanted splitting of link power?

Example: Lets say i link to ( "http://www.domain.com/bigtits.html ") from some pages and to ( "bigtits.html" ) from other pages within my site.

Does Google have any probs with that on regular websites?

[Halfdeck]

Does Google know this is the same site, or would this cause unwanted splitting of link power?

Her reason #1 applies to all websites; her reason #2 is a little more blog-specific, because spammers like to use RSS feeds to scrape blogs (one site scrapes and republishes everything I write, but by using absolute URLs every scrape turns into more one-way links for me).

I personally think a 301 redirect in htaccess is enough for Google to figure out canonical URLs, but using absolute URLs makes it crystal clear which version you prefer. For example, if a website has no 301 redirect installed from non-www to www and no Preferred Domain set in webmaster tools but all the internal links are absolute and links to the www version, link juice will flow to the right URLs through those absolute URLs.

For people who doesn't quite get canonicalization,

"www.domain.com/"
"domain.com"
"domain.com/"
"domain.com/index.html"
"domain.com/index.php"

are all unique URLs to Google. If you have backlinks to different versions, instead of having one strong page you got 5-6 weak pages. Though Google will get better at figuring out canonical URLs over time, I wouldn't leave it to Google to figure it all out just yet. All you gotta do is install a 301 redirect so that backlinks pointing at different versions consolidate into one URL.

Reasons why you should care:

- More PageRank means fewer supplemental results.
- Consolidated link juice can mean more ranking power.

[LowryBigwood]

Cool, I use the 301 redirect to try to keep from having my pagerank split. I wasn't sure if it was enough, but you answered it perfectly. Thanks!