Are absolute paths in URLs helpful if they contain keywords?

[KenBarlow]

I used to be second on Google for my primary keyword. The keyword is in my domain name. Historically, all links in my own pages to other pages in my domain used the entire URL. For example href="http://www.my_keyword.com/subpage.html". Recently I changed this to use relative URLs. So, to use the same example, the URL was changed to href="/subpage.html". I did this to allow me to run the website, unmodified, on my local computer with a local Apache installation.

Since making this change I have dropped down a little in my Google position, and I am wondering if it is related to the change.

Q1 When Google looks at keywords, does it take any keywords in the domain name into account? If it does, then I have inadvertently removed a lot of keyword occurrences.

Q2 Is there any way I can configure my local Apache installation to allow me to keep the absolute domain names [some kind of rewrite rule in Apache to directy www.my_keyword.com to localhost]?

Thanks for advice and suggestions.

[deadsea]

I can't imagine that relative vs absolute linking has any effect on rankings. As long as you didn't actually break any links when you made the change, that isn't the cause of the ranking problems. Googlebot knows how to construct absolute urls from relative ones. If it used keywords absolute urls in hrefs as a ranking signal, it would be beyond dumb.