static page plugin - relative path: not good for SEO

[Czorneboh]

Hi all!

In the journal Websiteboosting #18 (03/04 2013) on page 73 I was reading, that relative addresses in the source code should be avoided, otherwise could happen errors when to be crowled. Especially Bing has obviously problems.

It is advised in the article (analysis of a website/webshop) to use always absolute addresses. That has the other good effect, that it makes scraping or copying from pages or whole domains more difficult.

In the static page plugin there is the opportunity to type in absolute address for the created static page. But one has only to be aware to not overwrite an already existing page.

Right so far?

So I can create static pages with the absolute adress manually, right.

There are redirects from addresses

http://www.ost-impuls.de and http://www.blog.ost-impuls.de to http://blog.ost-impuls.de

Is there anything, I should be aware of beside using the same absolute page address a 2nd time, when creating a new static page or change a page from relative path to absolute path?

[garvinhicking]

I disagree. I think absolute URLs should be avoided wherever possible because it makes domain migration much harder. Also it wastes bytes.

Regards,
Garvin

[yellowled]

I disagree. I think absolute URLs should be avoided wherever possible because it makes domain migration much harder. Also it wastes bytes.

Funny thing: I asked a friend of mine about this who is one of the few SEO people I actually trust – he said just the opposite, but obviously from an SEO point of view.

I agree with Garvin, however, especially since all the arguments pro absolute urls come with a “I've heard about this, but it has never happened to one of my sites” comment. Issues with absolute urls, however, are quite real.

YL

[Dergln]

Funny thing: I asked a friend of mine about this who is one of the few SEO people I actually trust – he said just the opposite, but obviously from an SEO point of view.

I can't think of anything but content-stealing robots that go for the source code, which then screws up the link after being posted on the page the robot is working for.

Is that what he meant ?

[yellowled]

I can't think of anything but content-stealing robots that go for the source code, which then screws up the link after being posted on the page the robot is working for.

Is that what he meant ?

That too. Also, it might be possible that a crawler somehow screws up the base url resulting in huge non-existant file structures which (obviously) return error codes between 301 and 410 as well as eat up a lot of ressources for the crawler which (in extreme cases) might result in a bad ranking.

http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/

(Personally, I think that's a lot of assumptions being made.)

YL