Relative links and search engines

Are relative links bad if care is taken with 301s?

[diamondgrl]

Relative links are much easier to deal with in a development server-production server environment. Transfer your developing site from a development server's IP address to your domain name and all the links work still. My developers insist on their use for this reason.

But many people have said what a nightmare relative links can be for search engines, particularly Google. If someone links to you via [example.com...] and not [example.com,...] then Google et al. may see duplicate pages on [example.com...] and [example.com....]

My question deals with the situation of when you are careful to put 301 redirects from [example.com...] to [example.com....] Is this sufficient to eliminate any potential problems of having relative links? Or are there other things I'm not thinking about that require absolute links to be absolutely sure.

[edited by: pageoneresults at 1:25 am (utc) on April 21, 2005]
[edit reason] Examplified URI References [/edit]

[Stefan]

I'm of the thought that absolute is best. It makes it more difficult in some ways, (like if you want to zip a collection of html pages into a folder and send it to someone as a field report for speleo work that you've done, because the internal links on the pages, when clicked, will try to retrieve the online version), but it ensures that the SE's will keep things straight with regard to the URL's of all the pages.

I had problems because of relative linking a couple of years ago with G, because of one incoming link to the index without the www on the front, and changed everything then, (and it took many, many hours). Afterwards, I also did a mod rewrite to ensure that all non-www links were directed to the www version. I tend to think that the 302 stuff that affected so many others, but not us, despite scraper/directory/php crap linking to us, was partly a result of those moves.

This is just speculation, of course, but better safe than sorry.