This section of our Search Engine Robot Indexing Tests tracks whether the search indexers gather data by following relative links: those links which point at local files in relation to the location of the current document.
Relative links include:
- Test1 - a standard link on the same level (test1.html)
- Test2 - a standard link to a subdirectory (2ndlevel/test2.html)
- Test3 - only linked from Test2, following a standard link to a parent directory (../test3.html)
- Test4 - an unusual link using the ./ (dot-slash) construction to start at the current directory (./test4.html)
- Test5 - a broken link, overcounting the number of ../ parent directory levels and moving above the root level of the server (../../../../../../test/relativelinks/test5.html)
(test 6, the relative link with http in the middle, caused too many problems, so I ditched it.)
Useful Resources
IETF RFC 2396 - Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI): Generic Syntax