Absolute URLs in Internal Links can Hurt your Ranking in Google
Recently, one of the sites I was working on, had a great fall in ranking in Google. Me, along with the owner have revised the site and was blaming it for over optimization, since I have also used link titles (<a href=”index.html” title=”“>) for every links.
But I have many sites that are performing well with the link titles. So, I can’t blame it on the link titles. But, I also changed the Relative URLs (<a href=”index.html” title=”“>) to Absolute URLs (<a href=”jttp://www.example.com/index.html” title=”“>).
The major reason to use Absolute URL is because of the suggestion that many SEOs are providing to fight content forgery by scrappers. It creates problems for them to steal your contents. And if they do that, you can also get links from their site.
But, after implementing this trick on 2 sites, both sites’ rank fell rapidly. When, I changed the Absolute URLs of one site to Relative URLs, the rank started rising.
Now, here are my analysis and thought about this:
- When Google finds a link with http:// prefix, it thinks it is an external link and most of the page may seem like floating pages
- In recent studies on “Site Authority”, many SEOs refer that internal pages create the authority for the site. So, if Google treat them as external link, then the Authority Link Juice can’t get transferred to the main site
- Google bot generally goes through sites and find their internal pages first and record links with http:// prefix for later crawling. So, absolute URLs can slow down the crawling process.
Disclaimer: I still need to update the 2nd site to blame it on the Absolute URLs. But, any comment here may differ with other SEO professionals experiencing other things.
© Asif Anwar of SEOPPCSMM.COM - Source: Absolute URLs in Internal Links can Hurt your Ranking in Google
