Hi guys

Anyone can explain what are the difference between

Absolute URL & Relative URL

thanks

Absolute URL:
http://www.playitontheweb.com/games/...ame-2-game.htm

Relative URL:
/games/The-Torture-Game-2-game.htm

You can use either when referencing internal pages (the <A> tags on your site) -- relative is much better because if you change the directory structure or the domain, you don't have to change the URLs if they're relative.

The search engines sees them as the full URL even if you are using relative URLs.

Actually absolute URLs seem to be the better option for search engines. They can read the relative URL, but the absolute makes sure of it. Also if someone scrapes your content absolute URLs will point people back to your site. The relative URLs keep them on their site.

I used to use relative URLs for everything, but I've been using more and more absolute URLS now. If I do use a relative URL I use a root relative, but I'm slowly dropping the root relative and going with more absolutes.

It is a pain for moving things around though.

Yeah, it's a pain to move things around, and it also makes your page size larger.

The benefits don't outweigh the drawbacks to me. Relative URLs make for much cleaner code imo.

I agree with you about the cleaner code, but I'd also like the search traffic so I don't mind the absolute URLs

I assure you, search engines have absolutely no problem reading relative URLs, it doesn't help one bit in terms of search engines to use absolute URLs.

I know search engines can read relative URLs, but...

If someone scrapes your content and you're using relative URLs they can easily mirror your entire site. If you use absolute URLs then the links point back to your site instead of staying internal in the scraped version of your site.

You do end up getting links from the scraped sites. Low quality links to be sure, but still they're free links in the sense you don't have to do anything for them.

Those links can also help search engines determine which is the original version of the content. If you use relative URLs then it's possible it could be the scraped version of your content that ends up ranking while your original content is seen as the duplicate version.

If your content is syndicated and people can subscribe via email then you need to use absolute URLs if you want the links in your content to lead back to your site.

If by some chance you have canonical issues then relative URLs only enhance the problem.

Are there other solutions to the above? Sure, but using absolute URLs is generally the easier solution, especially if you're using something like PHP includes to build your site. If you're using includes there's a good chance your most important links (top level navigation, footer, sidebar) are likely in the one file and changing the URLs in the case you do move pages is trivial.

Absolute URLs doesn't solve the problem you're describing, any scraper worth their salt will simply do a global replace "http://www.yourdomain.com/" with "" and voila, your absolute URLs are now relative...

I guess article scrapers that just pull bodies of text instead of scraping whole sites might not bother replacing links.

You're welcome to disagree and I'm not telling you have to use absolute URLs. I'm only mentioning the common thinking in the seo community and things I've observed.

This isn't an end all be all kind of seo thing. All I'm saying is absolute URLs can help solve some issues associated with search engines.