Absolute internal links and keywords

[Zapruder]

Hi
It appears that Google will equally successfully index internal pages whether you use absolute or relative internal links.

What I'm trying to determine is the following...

if your domain name contains your keyword is there any benefit attached to using absolute internal links, given that all the links from your home page to your other pages will then contain your keyword, as opposed to a relative link which won't contain it?

e.g. keyword = widgets / domain = www.widgets.com
Abs link = [widgets.com...] (incl keyword)
Rel link = aboutus.htm (no keyword)

Thanks a lot

[bhartzer]

From my experience, I have not seen any benefit attached to using absolute internal links.

I'm not sure whether the keyword in the domain name would affect the prominence of the keyword on the page, though; and this would probably be where it would potentially have an effect on rankings.

[jranes]

I could be wrong but my observations have led me to believe that some of the older crap spiders out there do much better with the absolute link. Especially if the internal link must have a relative path such as ../ or ../../ . I couldn't get deep pages into some engines untill I lost the relative internal paths and went absolute.

[HyperGeek]

It appears that Google will equally successfully index internal pages whether you use absolute or relative internal links.

Over the past year I have switched to using absolute links on the 10-20 sites we manage. Benefits have been faster and more thorough indexing (deeper crawls as a result?).

We also experienced a drop in the amount of pages that were indexed (as did many), but only to the sites that we used relative linkage on. As soon as we made the links absolute, those pages ended up back in the index within 14 days.

Maybe that info will help a bit.

Here's some good eatin' for your brain...
[searchengineworld.com...]

Enjoy!

[Zapruder]

Thanks guys for the feedback. Great little article, HyperGeek. Definitely looks like absolute links are the way to go from a few angles!
Cheers