Partial Linking or full URL

[devilzfan300]

I just realized something and I wonder if it is holding back my PR and SERPs...

Throughout my website, I do not use full URLs to link to other pages. For instance, In my menus, I just say <a href="partners.html"> as opposed to <a href="http://www.hitsbam.com/partners.html">. Does it make a difference how you link to your other pages?

I hope I explained that correctly...

[bcombs]

To my knowledge, it should make no difference.



Brian

[theJack]

I would hope the PhDs at Google would be able to interpret your links as the absolute full URL.

(I admit I don't know for sure though)

[devilzfan300]

I just want to make sure a partial link still counts as an inbound link to another page to help increase pagerank.

[awall19]

relative links are converted to their static location before assigning a document # to the new page. its fine...

[toddieg]

yup...don't worry about it...google is smart

[I, Brian]

There is one worry, though - that of split Pr if you don;t redirect users to the form you are promoting.

In other words,

http://www.website.com
http://website.com

If someone comes to your site via the form that you are *not* using, then relative URLs *without* a redirect to the form you are using may result in your natural backlinks being messed up.

Ideally, you should use a redirect for the www or without www form, when using relative URLs. Using absolute URLs removes the problem for internal links.

[Nazarite]

hi Brian,

To my understanding, I should just be consistent with how I build my link popularity. (http:// vs http://www) but are you saying that there something else I can do?

Could you explain the redirect again. Should I use relative linking or absolute?

[I, Brian]

I mean that if you use relative linking, to ensure that you use a simple redirect so that if you want all your URLs to show as www, if that's the form you prefer in your URLs. Vice versa if you don't.

[Shawn]

What Brian said is true..just use something link this in your htaccess file

[code:1:2b874fa71c]RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hitsbam\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://www.hitsbam.com%{REQUEST_URI} [R=permanent,L][/code:1:2b874fa71c]

[eCommando]

Relative URL or absolute urls both are okay. I prefer relative urls.