'GoogleGuy' actually said "absolute links have less potential for getting messed up [when Google indexes your page]. Even though it should not make a difference, I recommend absolute links.”
What is the reality?
Unfortunately, we are faced with the fact that people often scrape the content from a website and then place it on their own site. So if you’re website is going to get scraped you may as well try and get a link back to your site. You can only make that happen with an absolute path!
The problem is not just with scrapers either. There are other quite legitimate ways to get your content show up on other websites; like RSS and web-services. I think that in todays world wide web, it’s no longer just a question of personal preferences - absolute paths are the safe and recommended way to link.
Another scenario is if someone links to your site using yoursite.com rather than www.yoursite.com, the search engine will follow the link and start crawling. If you are using absolute links then the search engine will crawl your site and only see the pages as www.yoursite.com/index.html. If you use relative links the the search engine could crawl your site as yoursite.com/index.html, which is probably not what you want to happen.
Undoubtedly most of your links from other sites will be linking to www.yoursite.com, not yoursite.com. If the search engine for some reason (and it does happen) decides to index your site with yoursite.com and not www.yoursite.com, then you could suddenly lose all of your search engine rankings because the non-www version of your site is indexed and the www version is not.
It's always good to be consistent with your internal linking, and it's great practice to make sure that all of your internal links specify exactly the domain name of your site so that there is no question of which pages should be indexed.
As a web developer and SEO, I can only recommend Absolute linking and for the following reasons:
- They are much easier to manage as there is less chance of broken links appearing when moving documents or pages around.
- There are many more occurrences of your full domain name in the source code, which can only be good.
- They are much more recognizable to your visitors who are then more likely to bookmark your site.
- Search engines can't miss or mess up any links when crawling your site.