Hi:

Can somebody please clarify for me on the topic of internal links?

On my page, http://www.histology-world.com, I have a menu on the left. I have most pages on my site on the menu. They all also have a link back to my homepage. However I use a relative directory structure, rather than absolute.

If I were to use the full page URL on the link back to my homepage, would that hurt or help me in the search engines. Does that count as a link?

If this would help with search engine optimization, it would be a very easy change to make. I don't, however, want to do it if it will harm my page ranking.

Thanks for your imput!

Sunkist

Personally, I don't think the type of links have any impact on your search engine rankings, but what I'd recommend you do is find websites with good search engine ranks and look at their source code.

How do you know if a site has good search engine ranks? Search for a very common term, or terms, on a page, and if it appears in the top 5, then it's ranking is very good. Now, look at the source code and figure out if it's relative or absolute.

Also, this isn't related to your topic, but if you have dead links on your site, then I've heard that you will lose your rankings, so it's a good idea to validate your links once in a while.

using your full url in links sometomes confuses search engines, makes it think its a different site. use ../ in your links to mean "back a directory"