Change relative to absolute urls?
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Is it worth the time to go through a site that was built in Dreamweaver and change the relative urls to absolute urls?
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It's been a while since I used Dreamweaver but I remember the standard link format being relative. Is it possible if I change the relative urls throughout the 50 pages on the site, that the site administrator (not me) will accidentally revert everything if he updates the site? Wondering how to explain this as being more important than his ease of maintaining the site...
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My experience has been Yes, for some things...
Doing it for internal page links should make your SEO better by eliminating the chance the search engines will misunderstand those links. And if a page of yours gets scraped, the internal links on that page will at least count towards your site
Doing it for IMPORTANT images will insure that the search engines can correctly index those images. Also it makes it possible for social media like Pinterest to use those images, and for others like Facebook to display an image from your page when that page is Shared.
I usually don't bother with absolute URLs for things like CSS files. Or for images which do not need to be indexed or shared, like buttons and icons and such.
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oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
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oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
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