Back links

[claire_darcy]

Hi,

I am working on optimising our site for the search engines and noticed in our templates that the link back to our home page is specified as
"<a href="/index.html">Home</a>"

In order for the search engines to pick up on these and count them as a backlink to the home page do they have to be specified in full rather than as a relative link like this?

Thanks
Claire

[markhallgate]

many people say many different things when it comes to SEO, but i have always been told to use the full link, and in any case it won't hurt to but may hurt not to.

[wjcampbe]

The short link will be correctly interpreted by the engines as an internal link.

Putting in the long version will mean your visitors have to do a DNS lookup to interpret the full URI before moving to the linked page, which could raise several issues.