Changing Internal Link Structure (good/bad?)

bizousoft

bizousoft

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Mar 5, 2010
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Site has about 20k indexed pages.

I want to change the internal linking. Instead of linking to individuals html files (e.g.: "/index.html") it will link to URL (e.g.: "http://domain.com").

Has anyone ever done this type of change in the past? Did it hurt or benefit the site in anyway?

Thank you

P.S: I'll test it myself and let you guys know if anyone's interested
 


Basically you are going from relative links to absolute I think. Right?

I like absolutes. But not sure if that is going to help you. I doubt it will hurt. Absolutes are good at helping search engines from not getting confused. Also helps if someone lifts parts of your site as then it still links back. Plus if your keywords are in there it gets them in the code more...
 
Sound like you want to change the file extension of all your pages. That means a full site 301 and a few weeks of reduced traffic while the engines update their index.

Have you considered the risk versus reward?
 
As long as you're changing it to the same destination such as:

/contentpage.html becomes http://www.mysite.com/index.html
/deep/content/page.html becomes http://www.mysite.com/deep/content/page.html

Then you will not have any problems. In my experience, Google (and other engines) generally translate relative URLs to absolute anyway, so most likely Google is already internally doing the conversion prior to following your links. If you're attempting to alter the formatting though such as:

/index.html becomes http://www.mysite.com/category/index.html than you will have to 301 redirect and wait for your ranking of the original page to transfer to the new one (which takes time).
 
I did something similar with a fairly large site recently and saw some drops in positioning and traffic for a few weeks before everything jumped back up. I probably won't do it again, personally. It was a big risk.
 
Excellent replies thank you. Will try it and let you all know

my competitor has all absolute links and very similar content to mine, he's getting crawled like crazy while I have 1/10 of his total indexed pages. So the reward may be pretty big.
 
Absolute links will definitely help with indexation, moreso on larger sites where small errors are often overlooked.

Do a quick scan with Linksleuth to see if you have any broken links to start with. Also, Absolute links will help against most content scrapers as the URLs remain in tact when the content is scraped. One of my clients actually increased it's backlinks by x,xxx because his site was frequently scraped.

While you're doing it, why not revisit their entire architecture, if they are letting you play with the internal linking, it's very easy to create some virtual content silos around important (read $$ making) parts of your website.
 
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bizousoft said:
Excellent replies thank you. Will try it and let you all know

my competitor has all absolute links and very similar content to mine, he's getting crawled like crazy while I have 1/10 of his total indexed pages. So the reward may be pretty big.
Click to expand...

If that's the case, I would give it a shot, especially if you don't need to rely on the site revenue for the next few weeks. Just make sure you go about everything the right way as far redirecting and all that goes.

It's a risk but as long as you are bringing something valuable to the table it shouldn't ruin anything
 
bizousoft said:
Excellent replies thank you. Will try it and let you all know

my competitor has all absolute links and very similar content to mine, he's getting crawled like crazy while I have 1/10 of his total indexed pages. So the reward may be pretty big.
Click to expand...

Side benefit....

If you ever get scraped you'll likely get backlinks from all the scraped pages (because they're absolute links)
 
supposedly this is a quote from Matt Cutts

I recommend absolute links instead of relative links, because there's less chance for a spider (not just Google, but any spider) to get confused. In the same fashion, I would try to be consistent on your internal linking.
Click to expand...
 
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