Does Google care how you write internal links?

[Hyrule]

I am changing ecommerce platforms. For my internal linking on the old site there was a lot of old links written like this:

http://www.domain.com/page-name

But now i am writing links mostly like this:

/page-name

Will that make a difference to search engines? Is one easier than the other for them to interpret?

[JimSkychief]

Hi There!

The first link example is called an absolute URL, and the second is a relative URL. Search engines do not care about the form. One is as good as the other from an SEO perspective.

It is possible to make a case for the prefered use of absolute URLs for some technical reasons, which you should read about here: http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/646

Best Wishes!

[TellThemEverything]

No difference if you use either style - BUT make sure you prefix with / or you will find many 404's being reports from pages where you are inside a folder

For example a link to widgets from your home page resolves to domain.com/widgets but that same link from folder /hello resolves to domain.com/hello/widgets...

[Dan-Petrovic]

So far I have not seen any differenece between the two. In one video Matt Cutts did state that full URL can be safer in some situations though, so if you have an equal choice it would make sense to choose that one.

[Guest]

This post is deleted!

[KeriMorgret]

One advantage of using the first type of URL (the absolute URL) is that if people scrape (copy) your content, the links within the content will go back to your site.