29 Nov Google: Doesn’t Matter if You Use Absolute or Relative URLs for Internal Links via @MattGSouthern
“Ultimately, I mean, your site has correctly implemented canonicals and has a single uniform domain being used so no duplicate domain issues. So, in that theoretical case where you have a theoretically perfect website then it doesn’t matter at all if you use absolute or relative URLs.
So, from that point of view, use whatever is easier for you. Oftentime relative URLs make it easier to test things locally so maybe that’s better. That’s not something I would really worry about there. I would really leave it up to you, and if I were working on this website, I would see which of these were easier in this specific case with whatever CMS I’m working on, and just kind of use whatever makes sense there.
In the case where your website is not is not a theoretically perfect structure – which probably most websites are not – then working with absolute URLs, if you can, make sure they really point at the canonical versions of all the URLs you have. Probably makes a little more sense, because you don’t have to worry about things like what if Google or some other person ended up accessing the non-WWW version of the website.
With absolute URLs we always find our way back to your preferred version. In practice, you can also work around this by using the rel-canonical and generally figure that out there anyway.
So, in the theoretical perfect situation, use whatever makes sense. In the realistic situation I’d still say use whatever makes more sense for you.
One thing that sometimes comes up is that sometimes people try to use absolute URLs to fight against scrapers. From my point of view that doesn’t really work that well because most scrapers know how to deal with URLs.
So, absolute or relative, they’ll get around that anyway and there are probably smarter things you can do to work against scrapers if you’re seeing that’s happening with your website.”
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