Anything But Coffee

Todays post is just going to be a nice and quick one about Absolute and Relative Links. While sitting at work today I had the “oh so fun” experience of trying to explain to a client why we do things a certain way. Normally this is a daily part of the job and not much of an issue. But this client just happens to be one that took it upon himself to learn some SEO tactics and only did a half-ass job doing it and now thinks he knows everything.

There are few things more frustrating then a client who only has a little knowledge and tries to pretend that they are an SEO Guru.

So I proceed to try and explain the differences between Absolute Links and Relative Links and why we use what we use. Funny thing about website links, there are a few different ways to code them and they all are correct. But in some cases it might be better to use one over the other. And thats when I realized that maybe some people don’t actually understand the difference between the two, so here we go.

Type Of Links

There are basically two types of links, they are:

• Fully Qualified Links also known as Absolute Links are links which the path is created whenever your link uses the full URL of an page. For example, http://www.yourwebsitehere.com is an absolute path to a specific web site. This method is the best choice to use because it will never result in a broken link unless you type in wrong from the start, so always check your links. This is also what you want to use if you are sending anyone to another site. Some people will tell you that it is not needed to use internally on your site but from my experience, not using absolute links for example in your navigation bars can cause a great deal of errors from spiders when the crawl your site. It’s better to be safe then sorry.
• Relational or Relative Links are used much more often than absolute paths and look like this <img src=”../images/title.gif”> The .. in front basically means move up one level in the directory. So you don’t have to write the full path. Any time you need to send a person from one part of your site to another a relative link is ok to use but I would still use a fully qualified link just to be safe. But if you wand to include an object from your site such as an image on one of your pages a relative link will work just fine.

Well I hope that was enough to help you understand the difference between Absolute and Relative links. It really is more of a personal preference for the way you link on your site. Just remember its always better to be safe and take the extra few seconds to code the link correctly so that way you ensure your links will always work.