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When putting ./ or ../ to links instead of writing the whole path, does that affect SEO in any way?

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Short answer: relative paths (./, ../) do not automatically trigger an SEO penalty. They are normal URL references that browsers and bots resolve against the page's base URI. That said, a few practical edge cases can cause indexing confusion or broken links if templates, base tags, sitemaps or canonicalization are inconsistent. This expands on points raised by and the replies from , , and .

Relative URLs are resolved by user agents according to the standard for URI resolution; the HTML <base> element can change the resolution base if present. See the URI resolution spec and the HTML <base> docs for the exact rules:

Practical, SEO-focused best practices

  • Sitemaps must use fully qualified URLs; include absolute URLs in your sitemap: http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
  • Emit a single canonical URL (use an absolute URL in the rel=canonical tag) so search engines know which variant to index.
  • Prefer consistent link generation. Root-relative URLs (for example, starting with /path/) are a safe compromise: portable and less prone to base-tag mistakes.
  • Avoid mixing hostnames, protocols (http/https), or inconsistent trailing slashes for the same content — those create duplicate URL candidates.

Quick examples

<link rel="canonical" href="https://www.example.com/path/page.html" />
<base href="https://www.example.com/subdir/" />

Troubleshooting checklist

  • Verify your sitemap contains absolute URLs.
  • Confirm canonical tags point to the preferred absolute URL.
  • Crawl the site with a crawler or use Search Console URL inspection to see how Google resolves links.
  • Check server logs for unexpected 3xx/4xx responses from internal link crawls.
  • If using a CMS, standardize the templating layer so all internal links are generated the same way.

If the site is consistent and canonicalization is correct, using ./ or ../ for local-to-page links is generally fine. Use absolute URLs where the protocol/host must be explicit (sitemaps, canonical tags, syndicated content).

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Member Avatar for almostbob

SEspiders are good but
consider the worst case
If the search engine misses something, hiccups, when spidering your relative links and does not record a baseref
then your hard written pages end up linked as ./mypage at google not
and you get KOed in your search engine ranking

have a long dissertation on why NOT to use relative links

Edited by almostbob because: n/a
Member Avatar for chandi786

if you use some software which shows you, how your page looks like to search engines then you will get to know your answer. In my point of view that does not make much difference.

Member Avatar for OnlineMarketing

When putting ./ or ../ to links instead of writing the whole path, does that affect SEO in any way?

It's true that "worst case scenario" Google might screw up your links. If you have a very small site with only a few links then you should play it safe and put in the full link.

However, Google counts speed. A lot. If you have a large site or a lot of links, I think the faster page (by using the abbreviated links) is more important than protecting yourself from "worst case" situations.

Member Avatar for canadafred

When putting ./ or ../ to links instead of writing the whole path, does that affect SEO in any way?

My opinion on this is to keep consistent. If you use the slash once then always use it otherwise, for some strange reason, the search engine can consider a variation as pointing to a different webpages in the same way as www.mysite.com/index.htm is not considered the same as www.mysite.com/ or www.mysite.com

Now, I have a funny feeling that this is changing but haven't seen any concrete proof of this as of yet.

Edited by canadafred because: n/a
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