Base href tags

[Diana]

The real address of my site is different from its domain address, so my brother has put base href tags in the meta tags to make the search engines index it by its domain name rather than by its real address. But since he did, I've noticed a dramatic slump in hits from MSN. I noticed the same thing before once when he put base href tags in a couple of pages. A few weeks after he took them out, the number of hits improved a lot. Would that be coincidence or could it be the base href tags causing the slumps in hits? Can they interfere with the way search engines index and spider and rank sites? If so, whereabouts in the head tags is it best to put them? Can they somehow obscure the meta tags? Is it best to put them last? Or is it better not to have them at all?

[Alan Perkins]

Welcome to the forums Diana :hi:The real address of my site is different from its domain addressPlease elaborate. I'm not quite sure what you mean by this. How many sites have you got?

[highman]

Sounds like the base href is a different Url to the page itself?

Looking at your profile, that is indeed the case, get your own domain (broadcaster) and your own webspace so you dont have to redirect to the lineone address, all will become better once you do that!

Sorry its a bit late Diane.....but, welcome :hi:

[Alan Perkins]

Originally posted by highman
Looking at your profile, that is indeed the caseThat's odd - I looked for www button but didn't see it when I posted!

Diana those base href tags are not being used correctly, in my opinion. The HREF attribute should set the server path to be used for all relative references within the current document. So you are setting broadcaster.org.uk as your server path. But broadcaster.org.uk just redirects to website.lineone.net/~p.f.holbourn/ meaning every relative link on your site becomes a redirect. This could well influence your MSN rankings. It is also a waste of time since without the base href tag, the user would end up at the same destination without going through the redirect.

Immediate advice: remove the base href tags
Long term advice: what highman said

[ihelpyou]

Welcome to the forums Diane! :cheers:

What highman and alan said.

To stress:

You will have to get your own domain and own web site if you wish to do anything substantial on the internet.

[Diana]

Thanks everyone. The reason my brother put base href tags in was to make the search engines index my site by its domain name rather than by its real address so the address would stay the same if the site moves. The reason the addresses are different is because my site is being hosted on the free space my brother was allocated when he signed up to an ISP. If I was to move the site to the host I bought the domain name from, I'd have to pay for the space and the data transfer. But I think I will.

Thanks.

[potato]

The intended BASE HREF tag's purpose is only to ensure url integrity within a site (to fix improper links in deeper structures, e.g. if you'd like to reference all images by eg 'image/001.jpg' no matter from which directory inside the site is called.

I found that a couple of firewalls have problems with it (e.g. BorderManager 3.0 tries to access numberous combinations of non existing links causing lots of 404.errors). I am rebuilding my site at the time being and am going to remove it at last. Don't know though if it affects SE ratings.

On the other hand, would the BASE HREF tag count as an inbound link? Has it any known SE value? Following this thread it seems to have one.

[Alan Perkins]

The BASE HREF is used in determining the absolute URLs of various kinds of relative links on the page. Putting it simply:

Without a BASE HREF: dest URL of relative link = URL of current document + relative link
With a BASE HREF: dest URL of relative link = BASE HREF + relative link

Spiders use a process called "URL Normalization" for determining the URLs to crawl. The BASE HREF tag figures in this process.