Comments on: SEO-Friendly URLs and Relative Links

By: Anton Oliinyk

Anton Oliinyk — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 21:00:03 +0000

Nice to hear that you resolved that, Andrew.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 03 Apr 2011 19:40:23 +0000

I had a problem with several sites where visitors were getting broken images and links for any relative path but it didnt’ happen to everyone and not in all browsers and I couldnt reproduce it on my PC, yet there it was when I looked on other ppls.. your base tag solution totally solved the issue which had been plaguing me for months! Thanks so much!

By: Anton Oliinyk

Anton Oliinyk — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 12:12:14 +0000

You’re welcome!

By: Zing

Zing — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:48:59 +0000

I found a solution from your site in which the problem already took 3 days to solve it. Much appreciate your work and efforts, thanks.

By: Anton Oliinyk

Anton Oliinyk — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 21:03:06 +0000

If you store images, CSS and JS on some external server you may find it possible to refer to the server with IP address instead of domain name. Once URLs will contain IP addresses there will be no need to do a DNS lookup for them.

By: Mat

Mat — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 07:06:39 +0000

What about WPO???. I had de Issue, i chose use the / at the beginning. but when you run a speed test like yslow you will find theres a lot of DNS lookups u need to clean.

absolute paths penalise you from DNS lookups. so thats why we need to find the way use relative paths as well.

of course if you get a CDN server you need full path on your images, js, etc.

but again, from this point of view a base tag, a slash, an absolute path is the same.

what i should try to do on a site is to make a rewrite rule without making any subfolder…

lets say.. if had:

http://www.domain.com/index.php?cat_id=4&name=blabla&page=4

i’d try to generate something like:

http://www.domain.com/blabla-4-4.html

so when apache redirects me, links will still the same (relatives)

the problem is that many times we’ve been sugested to make semantic friendly urls. So the pretty one would be:

http://www.domain.com/cat-4/page-4/blabla.html

from this point of view, what do you think ppl?

PD: im walking around this problem, so id love some suggestions.

MAT (Argentinian web developer)

By: Anton Oliinyk

Anton Oliinyk — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 18:37:54 +0000

You're welcome! Consider reading my other post on the subject: Rewriting for SEO-Friendly URLs: .htaccess or PHP? Personally, I don't like to rely on mod_rewrite and recommend to do URI parsing work in PHP code.

By: Dan

Dan — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 02:11:07 +0000

Thanks Anton this is great. and it’s one of those anoying oversights people run in to when setting up there $_Gets.

Having had some trouble with my htacess and my $_get being compressed down to the most optimal for several tasks, then having spent several hours looking for solutions, I gotta say that this page is a real life saver.

At first I thought that the mod rewite engine had a bug regarding rewritten rules for non existent / pages, all along I was missing a / on my css and other media in the header, however I can see how setting the base in the html is the ultimate solution if your writing portable scripts and want to define a structure in a config file.

By: Anton Oliinyk

Anton Oliinyk — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:39:21 +0000

Dan, thanks for commenting and noticing me about the solution!
Though I don’t like to modify environment config for every project, I’ll add your suggestion to the post.

By: Dan Lidral-Porter

Dan Lidral-Porter — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:10:45 +0000

I always use URLs relative to my site root. There’s an easy solution to the problem you cited above for this. On my development sandbox, I just create a new virtual host in the apache httpd.conf:

ServerName somesite.dev
DovumentRoot /path/to/dev/sandbox

Then, add a new entry to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 somesite.dev

After this, you can go to somesite.dev in your browser, and all the relative-to-root URLs will resolve as expected.