Glossary keyword - Absolute URL

Absolute URL is a URL that contains the complete address of the page. An absolute URL includes all the data required to determine a resource and lead to a particular webpage. They can be compared to relative URLs which only specify file paths. The absolute URLs, on the other hand, includes the domain names and protocols. This kind of URL uses the scheme://server/path/resource format. 

1. The scheme defines how the resource is to be reached. 
2. The path designates the order of directories heading to the target. If the source is eliminated, the target is the latest directory in the path.
3. Generally, the resource is the title of a file. 

While using the Absolute URL target can be an HTML page, files, program, image, or the others.

Advantages of Absolute URL

An absolute URL, unlike a relative URL, carries complete information that leads to a file. These types of URLs are incredibly more comfortable to control as there is less possibility of broken links appearing when transferring pages or documents. 

Another benefit of the Absolute URL is that while crawling the website, search engines can't avoid or mess up any links of the website. Therefore, Google advises Absolute URL because it is possible for crawlers to miss Relative URLs. 

Relative URLs make your site vulnerable by getting things easy for scrapers. However, applying absolute URLs helps to safeguard against tools duplicating the whole website onto a new domain code. Also, absolute URLs allow everyone to copy and share a full link. From the users' viewpoint, absolute URLs make it easier to link to their pages. 

Absolute URLs are the most trusted option for internal links. They guarantee the proper entrance of authority, which is the central purpose of internal linking. 

Disadvantages of Absolute URL

Absolute URLs are not proper for experimenting with the websites on a local or external server.