Absolute path and relative path with SEO

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Often see someone in the forum to ask the URL of the absolute path and relative path issues, in the site should be used what kind of? What's the impact on SEO? There is no absolute answer, and both have their pros and cons. Google employees johnmu a few days ago in Google Groups a fairly comprehensive summary. The following half-translated half explains the comment.

The absolute path URL has the advantage of:

+ If someone plagiarized to collect your content, the links will also point to your site. Some plagiarism is more lazy, even the links inside the past.

+ If the webmaster can not do 301 turn, so there is the problem of Web site normalization, use absolute path to help link point to the selected URL version. Assume that the webmaster cannot from the URL

Http://domain.com

http://flash.5617.com/

Do 301 to

Http://www.domain.com

Webmaster hope to be included in the version is the second, with www. Links in all pages use absolute paths directly, such as:

Http://www.domain.com/article.html

Http://www.domain.com

The link URL is hard-coded into an HTML file. This way even if a spider or a user enters the http://domain.com version, such as:

Http://domain.com/article.html

Links on this page use absolute paths to link to:

Http://www.domain.com/article.html

Http://www.domain.com

Users who click on these hard-coded links will return to the WWW version. This also helps search engine spiders identify which version you want.

+) Even if you move the Web site, the link in it points to the correct URL.

-The disadvantage is that there is no way to test on a test server unless the link is dynamically inserted. Because the links inside will point directly to the real domain name URL, not the URL in the test server.

-Unless the link is dynamically inserted, it will be difficult to move the content page. Because the location of the content page changes, the links on other pages may not be able to follow the changes and point to the original hard-coded absolute path.

Relative paths have the opposite advantages and disadvantages. The advantages are:

+) moving content is easier.

+) It is also easier to test on a test server.

-Disadvantage, when the content page changed position, the link is easy to fail.

-more easily copied and collected.

However, many acquisition software can automatically identify absolute and relative paths. So using an absolute path helps you copy your links to a collection site, and only in some cases it works.

So I usually suggest that it's easier to use a relative path unless you're not able to do a 301 turn and have a serious URL normalization problem. Under normal circumstances, the relative path does not have any side effects on the site SEO, and the absolute path does not have much special benefits. The likelihood of errors, such as search engine error-judgment URLs, is very, very low.