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Originally Posted by bhartzer
Anyhow, always always always use absolute links whenever you can. If you use relative links you can suddenly lose all of your rankings in the search engines--it has happened to me and was a nightmare for a few weeks until I got it all straightened out.
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I use relative urls more than anything else. The only time it would hurt you any is if google comes in via
www.domain.com and lists it as www. yet you are searching for just domain.com. Now in that event, google may devalue or derank pages in the domain.com as duplicate content, which would cause you to see rankings disapear, agreed. However, a simple mod_rewrite that takes anything coming in to domain.com and redirects it using a 301 to
www.domain.com, then you will never even see that issue.
Many of us develop sites on a subdomain or in a directory under our development site, then move it to its true home afterwards. In this case, relative is the way to go for ease of install later.
Not to mention doing it that way helps you steer clear of the sandbox later :)