Absolute or relative URLs, which is better?



In this episode of AskGooglebot, John Mueller explains the differences between absolute and relative URLs and if there is a preference in how a search engine crawls and indexes them. This question was submitted by Mike H. Thank you!

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fullname: John Mueller;

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20 thoughts on “Absolute or relative URLs, which is better?”

  1. I bet there are situations where this is not correct. Take e.g. an index.html and an index.php. Both files are on the root of the domain. Now I refer to domain.tld. The index.html is always loaded first. If this is not available, the index.php is loaded. If both files are not identical, which of course will happen very rarely, then I cannot automatically refer to the index.php with the reference domain.tld, for example. Here I actually need the absolute path domain.tld/index.php :-).

  2. Question: When handling redirects after a redesign, do they always need to remain in place or will Google replace the old indexed links with the new ones over time? Can you please give some advice for best practices handling and managing redirects. Thanks 🙏🏻

    Reason: I had a very old and messy website recently, not only were the links on the old website badly formatted but the were even older pages still indexed and available of the previous website so I had to create a LOT of redirects. I love to keep things tidy so wondering will this change over time as I have a Shopify converting to WordPress at the moment and same thing, Shopify seems to create links for links when it comes to the blogs in comparison to WordPress websites.

  3. Thank you sir for valuable information…
    Your way of express is very nice and understandable.
    And you are physically identical to my teacher Dr. Ashad sab.
    God bless you and live a happy long life. Regards

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