SearchTools.com

Testing Robots and Relative Links

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

W3C Universal Resource Locators: Partial (Relative) Form

RFC 1808: Relative Uniform Resource Locators

2002-05-21