What are the SEO implications of non-absolute URL links on Quora's RSS feed?

I try to always go with absolute URLs for a few reasons.  None of them are make or break your SEO, but things that have identified through testing, experiences, and some theory: -Scrapers have a higher chance of giving credit to you if they scrape content without replacing URLs.  Makes it harder for them to take content and try to index it first to be the original source.  However, with how scrapers have evolved, some will just find and replace anything with a URL and send it to their root (if they don't take the other pages of content) and using relative will take that away from them. -Some social media profiles I've used in the past that will take a feed (from your blog for example) and will pull in the links within the content, if they're relative they sometimes won't work.  Even if they turn the link into text, it's still a citation. -It better avoids issues with incorrect linking if you make it standard to use the exact URL you're trying to send it to.  For example: in the case of sub-domains.  I could see this being argued for people who want to move content and say it will more easily break links. Again, it's not going to destroy your SEO and I can understand why developers want to go relative.  It shortens code characters and allows an easier transition from development to production.  I currently still push for it with my developers. As for how it relates to Quora, I suppose any of the above could be applied.  I'm sure Quora has plenty of scrapers hitting it.

I don't see any big implications for SEO, except that when people rip off Quora content, Quora won't get any links in exchange. Relative URLs are a lot more versatile, though - they make template changes, etc. far easier, and mean developers don't have to dig into the guts of the code as often when designers want to change something. If the URL is relative, then a designer can add folders to that URL and make it work. If it's absolute, they can't do it because the URL starts with 'http' - unless they literally take the string that is the URL apart, they can't make changes to the start of the page address.

There are really no SEO implications. Quora can have their content scraped. Someone could easily export the data and build a website with identical URL structure and scrape the content pretty easily enough. The real question then is what are the SEO implications of being scraped. The answer is nothing. Quora uses the rel="canonical" tag on each page. Quora also has infinitely more PageRank and authority than any site that would scrape it. Suffice to say Google and other search engines will recognize Quora as the original author when they see duplicate content out there. So whether they make it easy to scrape their content or not doesn't matter. They will get scraped either way. This URL structure just opens them up to more widespread scraping. But at the end of the day this has no impact on the SEO of Quora.