Internal Links & the "Base = " meta tag...

[Danny@BFC]

Hi,

I recently made a few small changes to my site - one being the base meta tag in the head section,

as a result of this all links pointing to the the homepage/root had to be blank (or the link would point to http://www.mysite.com/www.mysite.com/)

all other links are pointing to just the html page/file name ie: "about.html" etc

webmaster tools is now showing internal links dropping by quite a bit, I assume its because of the above so my question is:

from an seo point of view is it better to hard code them (think thats the term?) as in write the full url's of all internal links and drop the base meta tag? interested in peoples views, thanks guys.

Danny:)

[OldWelshGuy]

Hard coding URL's is better, but it is not always possible. Hardcoding also helps if your content gets scraped, as at least you get backlinks from it that way. For SEO benefit the main benefit is that there is little chance of canonicalisation.

[fisicx]

Why not just remove the 'base' tag (it's not meta data).

If all your internal links are working then you don't need it as its purpose is to set the base URI for all relative links which is why you are having problems.

If you really want to use BASE then you need to update all your internal links so they are relative to the BASE URI.

[Danny@BFC]

Cheers Guys,

I'm not having any problems with the site,, just noticed that webmaster tools is now showing less internal links to all pages since adding the base tag (and changing the code on all links to be relative to the base uri).

The site has a lot of new content waiting to go on, I was experimenting before adding the new stuff...I hadn't thought of scraping..as its only a small site at the moment I'll be removing the base tag and hard coding from now on

thanks for the help:-)