Absolute links

[jamesnmb]

Is it possible to make all links on an Actinic site absolute rather than relative?

Thanks

[jamesnmb]

Anyone any pointers?

[Duncan Rounding]

I'm certainly not an Actinic fundi but I don't think there's a way to do that that I know of.
Why would you want that anyway?

[jont]

Using your own navigation system can then allow absolute paths - but as Duncan says why the need? There may be another solution to what you are trying to achieve.

[jamesnmb]

We've been told by our search engine optimisation company that it will aid the ranking of the site.

[jont]

That's interesting to hear - any views Mike (olderscot) or Malcolm (RuralWeb)??

[Mike Hughes]

I don't believe it. I've always used relative links and don't have any problems ranking well on Google and the other search engines.

Whenever someone says something like this I always go back to basics. i.e. is there any reason why a search engine should care whether a link is relative or absolute? The answer of course is no. Absolute links have no relevance to site quality, content, importance or trustworthiness. As long as the search engine can follow the links (and these days they'll happily follow complex cgi and multivariable links) there's no reason to change.

Mike

[jont]

That was my conclusion (but always best to get an experts opinion first)

[RuralWeb]

Agreed. Google and others have made massive improvements in their ability to follow all types of links recently. The SEO coy are just after your cash.

[RuralWeb]

This all rang a bell with me yesterday. Several years go this was a popular technique to try and trick google into giving a site a higher ranking by increasing the number of back links to a site by using absolute links within a site structure.

By replacing relative internal directory links with absolute (full http ) links then in theory you could increase the number of back links and so your ranking. I dont know if it was very good but I did hear that google was looking at it with a view to banning sites that used it.

The W3C guidelines are internal links should be relative and external should be absolute.

Having said all this I do use absolute links to a small degree on hard coded navigation within actinic and I have seen no good or bad effect. Also Actinic generates absolute links on some templates so I dont think it is worth the effort to be honest .

[jont]

Having said all this I do use absolute links to a small degree on hard coded navigation within actinic and I have seen no good or bad effect.

Same here - the navigation is hardcoded with absolute links so they work on any level of the site but allow Actinic to create relative links.

Google et al are probably aware of the fact that people need to use absolute paths on their site and I would guess whilst they are able to spider either with ease they will take a look at the referring page and the destination page and if on the same site will not add anything to page ranking status.