By observation I have seen that using <a href="./">Home</a> (Slashes and no http://) is best for internal linking. Whats your opinion?
Using the "HTTP://www.site" and the rest adds more bytes to the page making it bigger in size, and it's completely useless for internal linking, so don't use the HTTP full url method.
Actually what you're suggesting may make it harder for the spiders to crawl the links. Which is a shame, since I like relative internal URls.
worrying about a few extra bytes on your page is a bit silly given the relatively small size of text files vs the large size of most images/movies that seem to be so popular these days.
Do you know the maximum size that the spider eats from each page http://www.seochat.com/seo-tools/page-size/
Truth & common sense have a thin line between them.. As for the OP's question, absolute links are the best to prevent indexing issues. Unlike Dan Schulz I like using absolute URLs Big fish like their own side of the pond I guess.
Generally absolute URLs are the recommended way to go about it. The spiders are smart enough to figure out relative paths (./, ../, etc) but content scrapers and other tools are not. This way, in case some of your content does get picked up (especially for a blog), your internal links remain in tact and you may even be able to pick up some unexpected link juice.
Explain to me and the rest of us how you get any value from a site that uses duplicate content by the masses?
Well, you know as well as I that duplicate content is ignored but that does not always mean discounted. Google is good at recognizing duplicate content, especially re-posted content. Just because the page scraping your content does not show up in the results does not mean that Google does not recognize that link to your site. Granted a lot of content scrapers are generally in that shady area, you never know what bonuses you can pick up.
Thems are fighting words, brother! Pick your pistol, for we duel at 20 paces come dawn! (Seriously though, I said I like relative links, but from a developer's standpoint. From an SEO standpoint, however, I will use the absolute URLs to prevent indexing issues and to deal with scrapers all in one swoop.)
Bah. I brought nukes with me, and they're already in orbit. But enough of the off-topic threadjacking...
You developers and your smaller code Isn't that really the only benefit of relative links on the developers side?