Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Tool to search relative vs absolute internal links
-
I'm preparing for a site migration from a .co.uk to a .com and I want to ensure all internal links are updated to point to the new primary domain.
What tool can I use to check internal links as some are relative and others are absolute so I need to update them all to relative.
-
Thanks for the replies, I ended up getting a techie to run a script through the site for me which gave me all the info I needed. None of the tools mentioned did exactly what I was looking for.
-
That tool that Matt mentioned looked interesting, but it would have been painful to have to go through your site one page at a time.
As usual for crawling tasks like this, the paid version of Screaming Frog will do what you want. You can tell it to crawl your site looking for **href="yoursite.com **to find all occurrences of absolute internal links. You'd have to do a bit of regex magic to get it to find the relative links, but since by their nature a relative link will work even with the domain change, not sure why you'd be looking for those.
Or you could just do a find and replace of the URL string using something like phpMyAdmin directly in your database. That would be fastest as it would find & replace in one go, instead of having to manually edit each page.
Is this a WordPress site, there's a plugin specifically for finding and automatically updating these links. (It basically automates and puts a UI on the phpMyAdmin process mentioned above.)
Any of those ideas help?
Paul
-
Any chance anyone knows any other tools I can use to crawl a site and give me a report of absolute and relative internal links?
-
Thanks for the reply although I've checked that add-on and it's not available for download anymore. Any chance you can send me the local files? I've mailed the admin but haven't got a reply yet.
Unless anyone knows of any other tools?
-
I'll give you the best answer I can but at least consider the possibility that absolute URLs are actually better long term. Other than moving a site around as you're doing now, absolute URLs win on every factor.
That said, you're looking for FireLinkReport.
http://www.searchenginejournal.com/firelinkreport-research-on-page-links-firefox/17714/
It's a FFox add on that does internal vs. external, absolute vs. relative, etc. and this should create a report that helps you do what you need.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Should internal links in my table of contents be tagged as nofollow?
Hi All, I have the LuckyWP Table of Contents plugin installed. I recently noticed that you can tag your internal links with and nofollow. I understand that it's always a good idea to link internally and to pass link juice to my own content. But with detailed posts that have over 20 headings, I'm thinking that internal linking for headings may actually hurt me because it takes my links well above 100. Any ideas what the best practises are in this scenario? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
Errors In Search Console
Hi All, I am hoping someone might be able to help with this. Last week one of my sites dropped from mid first day to bottom of page 1. We had not been link building as such and it only seems to of affected a single search term and the ranking page (which happens to be the home page). When I was going through everything I went to search console and in crawl errors there are 2 errors that showed up as detected 3 days before the drop. These are: wp-admin/admin-ajax.php showing as response code 400 and also xmlrpc.php showing as response code 405 robots.txt is as follows: user-agent: * disallow: /wp-admin/ allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php Any help with what is wrong here and how to fix it would be greatly appreciated. Many Thanks
Technical SEO | | DaleZon0 -
Does an Apostrophe affect searches?
Does Google differentiate between keyphrase structures such as Mens Sunglasses & Men**'**s Sunglasses? I.e. does the inclusion/exclusion of an apostrophe make any difference when optimising your main keyword/phrase for a page? Keyword explorer appears to give different results..... I.e. no data for Men's Sunglasses, but data appears for Mens sunglasses. So if I optimise my page to include the apostrophe, will it screw the potential success for that page? Thanks 🙂 Bob
Technical SEO | | SushiUK1 -
Image Search
Hello Community, I have been reading and researching about image search and trying to find patterns within the results but unfortunately I could not get to a conclusion on 2 matters. Hopefully this community would have the answers I am searching for. 1) Watermarked Images (To remove or not to remove watermark from photos) I see a lot of confusion on this subject and am pretty much confused myself. Although it might be true that watermarked photos do not cause a punishment, it sure does not seem to help. At least in my industry and on a bunch of different random queries I have made, watermarked images are hard to come by on Google's images results. Usually the first results do not have any watermarks. I have read online that Google takes into account user behavior and most users prefer images with no watermark. But again, it is something "I have read online" so I don't have any proof. I would love to have further clarification and, if possible, a definite guide on how to improve my image results. 2) Multiple nested folders (Folder depth) Due to speed concerns our tech guys are using 1 image per folder and created a convoluted folder structure where the photos are actually 9 levels deep. Most of our competition and many small Wordpress blogs outrank us on Google images and on ALL INSTANCES I have checked, their photos are 3, 4 or 5 levels deep. Never inside 9 nested folders.
Technical SEO | | Koki.Mourao
So... A) Should I consider removing the watermark - which is not that intrusive but is visible?
B) Should I try to simplify the folder structure for my photos? Thank you0 -
Direct link vs 302 redirect
So we have recently relaunched a site that we manage. As part of this we have changed the domain. The webdesign agency that built the new site have implemented a direct link from the old domain to the new domain. What is best practice a direct link or a 302 redirect? Thanks
Technical SEO | | cbarron0 -
Links from Instructables.com?
This is a silly newbie question. But will posting on www.instructables.com with some valuable content and url link back to my site help with "linking"? Or do they put a no-follow on all links on their site? Thanks for answering! Ron
Technical SEO | | yatesandcojewelers0 -
Internal search : rel=canonical vs noindex vs robots.txt
Hi everyone, I have a website with a lot of internal search results pages indexed. I'm not asking if they should be indexed or not, I know they should not according to Google's guidelines. And they make a bunch of duplicated pages so I want to solve this problem. The thing is, if I noindex them, the site is gonna lose a non-negligible chunk of traffic : nearly 13% according to google analytics !!! I thought of blocking them in robots.txt. This solution would not keep them out of the index. But the pages appearing in GG SERPS would then look empty (no title, no description), thus their CTR would plummet and I would lose a bit of traffic too... The last idea I had was to use a rel=canonical tag pointing to the original search page (that is empty, without results), but it would probably have the same effect as noindexing them, wouldn't it ? (never tried so I'm not sure of this) Of course I did some research on the subject, but each of my finding recommanded one of the 3 methods only ! One even recommanded noindex+robots.txt block which is stupid because the noindex would then be useless... Is there somebody who can tell me which option is the best to keep this traffic ? Thanks a million
Technical SEO | | JohannCR0 -
Syndication: Link back vs. Rel Canonical
For content syndication, let's say I have the choice of (1) a link back or (2) a cross domain rel canonical to the original page, which one would you choose and why? (I'm trying to pick the best option to save dev time!) I'm also curious to know what would be the difference in SERPs between the link back & the canonical solution for the original publisher and for sydication partners? (I would prefer not having the syndication partners disappeared entirely from SERPs, I just want to make sure I'm first!) A side question: What's the difference in real life between the Google source attribution tag & the cross domain rel canonical tag? Thanks! PS: Don't know if it helps but note that we can syndicate 1 article to multiple syndication partners (It would't be impossible to see 1 article syndicated to 50 partners)
Technical SEO | | raywatson0