More often than not, most people type website/blog addresses without http or www. Nowadays, this is not much of a problem, as most sites have 301 redirects from non-www version to www version.
Whenever I have linked out to other blogs, I have used the URL from the address-bar. This avoids any typo in the URL. However, when I linked to the official Orkut blog on this post, I forgot to add http://.
And WordPress made me pay dearly. Apparently, WordPress adds the host domain(which, in this case is techzilo.com/) before the URL, meaning a useless jumbo like http://techzilo.com/en.blog.orkut.com.
This creates an unreachable link, which adds to the frustration of the readers. Some time back, I had a barrage of comments about the unreachable download URL, because of the above-mentioned error.
However, this is not just about reader frustration – the broken link can have serious implications on your search rankings. Your PR may (and probably will) be the first to suffer.
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I’ve also noticed this and actually experienced this error a few times . It’s worth to pay attention to it and never let it happen again
Actually my site too suffered from this kinda problem
My SERP rating decreased significantly
But with Google Webmaster tools, I corrected it
and a much more traffic from Google
I’m not sure whether this will have an impact on PR
@Ashwini: It will have big problems on PR- you see, PR decreases when you link out to unreachable URLs(which is what happens in this case).
This is a general “feature” of HTML in general. Back in the days when I hand-coded *everything* (including articles) I occasionally forgot the http and it wouldn’t work. Nowadays I use Wordpress (though I still hand-code my templates).
What happens when you leave-out the http is the server tries to find a directory called whatever .com.
Thanks for the info.
We need experts like you to give additional insights
I too have experienced this problem before, i corrected it.
I’ve also noticed this and actually experienced this error a few times… Great blog!