Optical frequency scanning interferometry (OFSI) is a high-precision absolute distance measurement technique with broad prospect. However,in practice, it is sensitive to the drift of optical path difference. Due to the influence of the amplification factor, the slight drift of optical path difference in measurement process is enlarged, which introduces obvious measurement error. The influence of Doppler effect introduced by the optical path drift of measuring arm on the measurement result has been detailedly analyzed in this paper. According to that the sign of the frequency drift error is consistent with direction of frequency scanning, the drift error is compensated by optical frequency scanning method with triangular wave. The experimental results show that, for the target at 3.6 m, the standard deviation decreases from 21.51 μm to 2.85 μm with 10 times of measurements. Furthermore, the contrast experiment result with interferometer shows that the standard deviation of residual error of the proposed method decreases from 18.6 μm (before compensation) to 5.6 μm, and the measurement accuracy is enhanced.