Absolute Links vs. Relative Links – SEO Intrinsic Value

It is popularly believed that absolute links provide the best value when it comes to SEO. They have less risk of getting messed up when they are being indexed, and they don’t provide the same risks that relative inks do when it comes to endangering your domain.

With that being said, we take a proper look into the absolute and relative links and see how they perform when it comes to SEO:

If you make use of relative links, scrapers can easily come in ad scrape your website, slap on a new domain name and create new website on the back of you work. With absolute links, scrapers can’t do that. Absolute links have an additional complex that provides protection to your website.

One of the main benefits of using absolute links is that it minimizes any issues that are related to duplicate content. Absolute links help make sure that Google doesn’t need to decode between various URLs on your website to ensure that they get the original content. The biggest issue with relative links is that in most scenarios, these links are not set up properly.

Then there will be various live domains for your website. Absolute links will actually help Google where should be investigating. While the may be benefits on the development site by using relative links, there are also risks to your website and business.

Google crawlers follow the internal links found on webpages to crawl for more associated pages. There is a limited number of URLs that these people crawl. This means that if Google comes across your website and you have a lot of pages, it is more likely to leave that site.

With absolute links, Google is actually able to streamline this crawling process. Besides saving time, it will also encourage the crawlers to come back and crawl more pages, which will go on to strengthen SEO efforts.