Changing Relative Links to Absolute Links, Any Risks?

Dealing with "relative link" link rot.

[ken_b]

Hopefully this is the right forum for this.

Apparently my site is suffering from "Relative Link" rot. Meaning the SEs have confused www.mystie,com with mysite.com. That looks like it is resulting in some sort of duplicate content issues.

At least that's how I understand the situation.

So, if I change from relative links to absolute links, is it likely that this issue will correct itself over time?

Any risks involved in doing this? Loss of traffic, rankings, etc.

Should I change all my internal links at once, or what? Or is it even neccessary to change all of them? What's best in the long run?

[Longhaired Genius]

Personally, I use relative links and deal with any mysite.com/www.mysite.com issues by permanently redirecting any requests for mysite.com to www.mysite.com in .htaccess like this:

Options +FollowSymlinks

RewriteEngine on

# redirects site.com to www.site.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST}!^www\.mysite\.com
RewriteRule (.*) [mysite.com...] [R=301]