best internal link structure for seo

by SirG
6 replies
  • SEO
  • |
I'm new here and am working on a small site, but want to do it in a seo friendly way.

I'm looking for advice on how to build the links on the site itself. Do I use the relative paths, or use the full site url plus file name?


For example:

[main nav]
home
author
characters

Would I use
www . site . com / home .html --OR-- "/"
www . site . com / author .html --OR-- author/
:confused:

Sorry about the "links" I had to separate them because I don't have enough posts to allow links... *sigh*


Thanks for the help,
SirG
#internal #link #seo #structure
  • Profile picture of the author HomeComputerGames
    I use relative paths. This allows for HTTPs (secure pages)
    This also allows me to develop on a development server and move the development to the live server without any changes.
    For the index of directories (index.php, etc..) I like to use just the directory. apples/
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    • Profile picture of the author SirG
      Thanks for the help, I prefer the relative link myself for the same reason (although, I hadn't thought about the https links). I was just wondering if the search engines prefer one method over another.

      Thanks,
      SirG
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  • Profile picture of the author The Expert
    I've not seen anything that indicates the Search Engines preff absolute links over relative.

    If you are concerned about internal link structure then a more important questions is how can you get your footer links structured properly?

    You need to have privacy, contact us, sitemap on the homepage, but it doesn't make sense to have it on other pages. NoFollow doesn't work, so the end results is that you need to have two separate footer structures.

    Seam goes for category links on blogs...but it's more difficult to do from a user perspective.
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    • Profile picture of the author JesseT
      This might be a little more than what you asked for but the closer the page is to your home page the better the juice flow.

      For example the actual location for the escription of the might be yourStore.com: Buy or sell online for free.
      but if you use apache or something to rewrite it to
      www.youstore.com/the-antagonist.html it will have more juice.
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      • Profile picture of the author SirG
        @expert
        Thanks for the tip! I hadn't thought about needing separate footer structures to avoid the duplicate content issue - I'll definitely put that into practice.

        @JesseT
        I'll do a little more searching around here for rewrite strategies like the one you mentioned. I know WordPress does this automatically, do you have a favorite resource showing how to do that on non WP blog sites?


        Thanks for the help - I really do appreciate it!
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  • Profile picture of the author JesseT
    Sorry for the delay. I learned this and most of my other SEO practices from my old boss. Basically you would just use an htaccess rewrite to drop the subfolder from the URI
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