The question for this article is whether or not you should use "absolute url's" or "relative url's"? Not only that, this article researches whether or not Google ranks these methods differently.

Absolute: You use the entire url pointing to the designated page.

ex. www.yoursite.com/page1/index.html

Relative: You use an automatic path to the file

ex. /page1/index.html

Relative gives a path 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 consider:

So here's the results of this study:

So it seems safe to say that Google doesn't necessarily rank "absolute/relative" paths differently.

Google may recognize the fact that neither method is wrong, it only reflects the designers preference.

There's only 1 type of Absolute and Relative paths that get a bad rank. Web sites that use "tracking url's" 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 great rank but nope, in fact their main page rank is 0/10. This happens because every time google crawls through their url, the site is different.

So if you care about page rank, keep your url's the same as the day your site was born!

About The Author

Martin Lemieux is leading the field online for web design and online advertising. Visit his company right away for many marketing tips & strategies: http://www.smartads.info

OASES - Online Advertising Search Engine Services

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The Web Clinic - FREE MARKETING TOOLS

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