building link count within site

is a relative link a mistake?

[too much information]

I was just taking a look at the backlink count for a site and I see that they have a bunch of 'backlinks' that are actually internal links.

So I started thinking... If my internal links contain the full address of the linked page (href="http://www....") is that picked up as a backlink and if it is a relative link (href="/pagetwo.html") is that just treated as something else.

Has anyone seen anything that would make you use one type of link over another, or any proof that it really doesn't matter?

[incywincy]

hi tmi,

i recently ported my website onto a test server to do some development and i can tell you that my life was made a misery by the absolute urls i had coded into my site.

i have now converted them all to relative urls and i can now move the code onto any machine and get it working quickly.

regarding google and backlinks, well imho google is smart enough to know the difference between an internal link and an external one.