I have a website with a 'home' link like many do and I am wondering whether I should do:
Home
or
Home
Obviously my homepage is contained in the index.html file. I have the first option implemented right now and it seems to work, but I am not sure what the preferred practice is or if there are any drawbacks to one or the other.
I appreciate any help!
Using href="/" may require the browser to submit two requests. The first to "/" which is redirected at the server to "index.html". If it's not a 302 redirect, then there may be some potential search indexing implications, though that's subjective voodoo that may not apply.
The other issue is if your server just returns the contents of index.html for "/". When that is true your site will have two different URLs for the same resource. Not having canonical URLs for the same reference will affect your search performance.
While linking to "/" may offer some flexibility in that you can change it in the future, the difference between index.html and index.php is usually a significant architectural change and "future proofing" against is pointless. If you're switching to a dynamic site in the future, you'll be updating all your home links anyway...so no need to optimize for what won't ever happen.
Of the two href="/index.html" is the better choice. href="./" will not work reliable because of the dot.
href="/" is the most flexible because it allows you to change to a different index page (index.php, index.asp, etc) later without updating your code.
Related
The question is very simple and even tho I might get downvoted into oblivion for it, I can't find a good search query for this.
If I link images, stylesheets, scripts and other things with the full website url (http://url.tld/css/style.css) instead of path (css/style.css) , are the visitors affected negatively? Is there any difference?
The html page is on the same link as the resource, so we're not talking about external resources.
This only makes a difference if you change your domain name. You cannot simply transfer the scripts over but have to change each line or the include of those files then.
One small thing to keep in mind: Your string will be longer and so your file will be a very bit bigger in size but it doesn't really matter.
Either won't affect visitors. Specifying the protocol might cause problems in the future if your users can switch between http and https. Specifying the folder also means changes when you move the site. So best to use relative
We are in the process of redesigning our company's web site, and we have been told by consultants that it is important that we either:
1.) Always link to a specific page i.e. foo.com/buy/default.aspx
or -
2.) Always link to a directory and allow the default document to load i.e. foo.com/buy/ where "default.aspx" is the default document
Is there any practical benefit to either approach? Does being 100% consistent in doing one or the other really gain us anything?
In your first example, always linking to a specific page helps prevent ambiguity in your URLs. Prefer a canonical URL (can be with or without a file extension). If you have to have multiple URLs for a single resource, for example /products/product1.aspx and products?productID=product1, then take advantage of the Canonical URL property in your code to specify which is the proper one.
Using extensionless URLs allows you to change technologies later. For example, /blog/post1.aspx is different than /blog/post1.php, say if you ever switched to WordPress (not common, of course, but it happens). It's just an easy way to make the links work no matter the technology. Plus, in my opinion it's always better to, as much as possible, mask the technology stack that you're using where possible. Extensionless URLs are becoming the norm (in my opinion) as people seem to be moving more toward an API-based approach to URIs as resources, and mixed technology stacks.
The second method you mentioned is good because it helps you make clean URLs
(don't click these urls they are just examples)
okay URL
http://www.example.com/example/example.php
clean URL
http://www.example.com/example/ (so much easier to remember, and shorter to write out)
here is a good tutorial I found that shows you how to accomplish this: http://www.desiquintans.com/cleanurls (htaccess)
In my website the menu is loaded from a file called "menu.php".
But my website has some sub-directories - /blog/ , /searchtool/, /shop/
They are with the same design, using the same CSS file.
But the urls for the images and for the links are like this:
<a href="my-page.html" >
<img src="images/my-image.jpg" >Image description</a>
If I add my website full URL before them - it works
<a href="http://example.com/my-page.html" >
<img src="http://example.com/images/my-image.jpg" />Image description</a>
My question is how does this affect my website performance?
Is it good or bad?
What problems can it cause?
Is there anything I should know before doing it?
How about using "../" before the addresses, will it work?
It depends.
The performance gain from using relative URLs is absolutely negligible compared to using absolute URLs. Of course, it is recommended to use relative URLs where you can, for example, the content residing on your own server within folders, which you can link easily.
The browsers are efficient enough to resolve relative URLs and as I said, it gives you no major performance increase as such. To answer your question, it is generally a common practice to use relative linking if you are referring to resources on your servers.
One could argue that using absolute URLs could cause a subtle decrease in load time as there will be a touch more DNS lookups, but don't worry, its so minimal it won't even matter. But always, use relative resource referencing where you can, its just less fussier.
Reasons for using Relative URLs
Easier to debug issues on localhost
Migrating to a different server like from Bluehost to Hostgator
Easier to work with shorter paths for development reasons
Helpful in developing on multiple environment
Reasons for using Absolute URLs
From a SEO standpoint,its better.Offers canonicalization
For search engines, doesn't matter really. They resolve relative well enough too.
All sorts of SEO problems on the web are caused by the use of relative URLs in links, canonicals and more.
An absolute URL contains more information than a relative URL does. Relative URLs are more convenient because they are shorter and often more portable. However, you can use them only to reference links on the same server as the page that contains them
Relative URLs are often used because developers have a test environment on another hostname and it makes it easy for them to move stuff between their test environment and their live environment. Other reasons include that it’s “just easier in website maintenance”. They’re also, in my opinion falsely, promoted by some websites about site speed because they’re “shorter” and thus “faster”.
have a good read here relative-urls-issues
I've just added a subdomain to my website, but can I point it to files in the main website with relative links? Like in the way that ../ goes back a folder, can you tell it to remove the first part of the url?
Also, I've just seen perhaps it's better putting the image folder as a subdomain too, is it worth doing this?
It's not possible to link to another domain using relative links, even if it is a subdomain. If you really want to do this you could make some kind of scripting helper to do that, but it would need to run on every page. With this you could run into problems on clients that have scripting disabled.
Putting images in a different subdomain is usually done to optimise loading speed. Browsers usually have a limited number of simultaneous requests to a single (sub)domain. By putting images on a separate (sub)domain you allow the browser to make more simultaneous requests and (in theory) allow your site to be loaded faster.
You can't use relative links, but you can use mod_rewrite to help you make a 'pseudo relative' link.
If your desired relative link were: href='folder/filename.typ'
then make it: href='root/folder/filename.typ'
in .htaccess enter: Rewriterule ^root/(.+)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1
You don't have to use 'root' of course, any word will do so long as it's unique in this context (i.e. not an actual folder name).
CAUTION: I found this thread looking for a solution myself. I've only just worked out this method. It does work on my site but I've not tested exhaustively yet.
I am moving a well ranked eCommerce site to WordPress, but the old site has URLs that all end in .htm. I want to avoid breaking links, and avoid losing pagerank, but Wordpress removes periods from custom URLs, so it seems that ending in .htm will not be an option.
What is the best way to handle this situation in terms of SEO? Roughly preserve the sitemap with different URLs and 301 redirect? Use some kind of URL rewriting trick? Any help is much appreciated.
Check out this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
You can also manually add redirects to your .htaccess I am not sure if that would work in your case though. Worth a shot, nevertheless. Make sure you put these rules after Wordpress' own block of rules
Redirect 301 /about.html http://yoururl.com/about/
Redirect 301 /contact.html http://yoururl.com/contact/