The question for this article is whether or not you should use "absolute urls" or "relative urls"? Not only that, this article researches whether or not Google ranks these methods differently.
Absolute: You make use of
the entire url pointing to the designated page.
ex. www.yoursite.com/page1/index.html
Relative: You utilize an automatic path to the document
ex. /page1/index.html
Relative gives a roadway
that is "assumed". Your browser will automatically "assume" to put www.yoursite.com before the link.
When researching these two methods, I used 4 factors to ruminate on
:
- 20 Different popular search terms
- Top 20 listings
- Top 10 "Inbound Links" for pages within the site
- Relative/Absolute urls NOT images
So heres the results of this study:
- The average results within the 20 search terms had a ratio of: Absolute 40% / Relative 60%
- The average inbound links for each page
I researched had a ratio of: Absolute %50 / Relative 50%
So it seems safe to say that Google doesnt necessarily rank "absolute/relative" paths differently.
Google may recognize the fact that neither method is wrong, it only reflects the designers preference.
Theres only 1 type of Absolute and Relative paths that get a bad rank. Web sites that use "tracking urls" or data base urls get a significant reduction in page rank emmediately.
The easiest way to notice this in action is to go to www.pogo.com (Online games). You would think that pogo has a nice
rank but nope, in fact their main page rank is 0/10. This happens because every instant google crawls through their url, the site is different.
So if you care about page rank, keep your urls the same as the day your web page
was born!
Martin Lemieux is leading the field online for web design and online branding. Visit his company right away for many branding tips & strategies: http://www.smartads.info
OASES - Online Advertising Search Engine Services
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