Absolute Linking for SEO

Absolute Links and Relative Links

Absolute links are the URL that specify the full name of the domain and the destination. For example to go to a page on the types of link you could copy http://www.seothegame.com/linking-strategies-ideas-for-linking-535 into your browser and a page on linking strategies will appear. This is known as absolute link as it is unambiguous. It can only go to one location.

Contrast this to a relative link /linking-strategies-ideas-for-linking-535. It omits the domain information. If it is on the same domain, it links to the same page. But place it on a separate domain then it can refer to a completely different page (assuming there is a page with the same name).

As a web designer, the relative link is more convenient as it becomes easy for the link to be transferred to alternative domain and if the content exists it would work perfectly well. Relative links are shorter and more convenient in many cases. However, in search engine optimisation there are advantages to using the absolute link.

Web content is scraped all the time and links are harvested to create content for spam web sites. If you use the absolute link then the link will still point to your website address. Even though scraped sites are of low quality. It is still a one-way link which may benefit your site.

Home Page Links

One other small point about linking is links to the home page are good but they must be included as the base URL and not the default page. So for example a link back to the home page of SEO the Game is http://www.seothegame.com/ and not http://www.seothegame.com/index.html or /index.html as this creates a duplicate content problem.