Does an Absolute Link Help in Google?

i.e. "http://www.example.com/john.html" instead of "john.html"

[Mister Bogdan]

Is it important, for google rankings, if webmaster put
full link after href in webiste source, for example: [example.com...]

or just: john.htm

?

[edited by: ciml at 10:07 am (utc) on Oct. 19, 2004]
[edit reason] Examplified [/edit]

[Patrick Taylor]

richlowe, thanks for the clarification. My point really was that in Sim Spider filename.htm (compared to /filename.htm) was sometimes producing an unspiderable link. Maybe this is (was) the same glitch that led to GoogleGuy's earlier comment about the greater reliability of an absolute link.

[RedWolf]

Is there a way to test absolute links offline?
I can't think of any. Maybe I missed something along the way.

It is very simple to do this. All you need to do is add an entry in your local "hosts" file that specifies what ip address to match with the name. You can either direct the domain name to your local machine using 127.0.0.1 or to a testing domain on a different ip address. I use this option because it gives me an almost exact duplicate of the environment on my server.

The hosts file is located on current windows machines in:

C:\WINNT\system32\drivers\etc

or whatver your widows system directory is.

The hosts file entry would look like this:

127.0.0.1 www.example.com