I have read a few times that it is best to link as so www.thebratpacksite.com/mollyringwald.html rather than mollyringwald.html when linking to pages within my site. Does anyone know if there are actually any advantages in doing this?
In my opinion, for a website is better to make links like mysite.html, myimage.jpg and to add a base url in meta tags. Less content and code. More text % and same links for SE.
The problem with relative links is that if you ever change the structure of your site, you will have to change the links as well. Many people have changed the structure and forgot to change their links, visitors as well as SE's end up trying to go to broken links. This is really bad for SE's.
It's always better to include the full URL when linking internally on your site (called absolute links or absolute linking). You wouldn't want a different "version" of your site indexed which could hurt your search engine rankings. (For example, if you use relative linking two versions of your site could be spidered and indexed like this: www.domain.com/page1.html and domain.com/page1.html.)
google sees http://abcblahblah.com and http://www.abcblahblah.com as 2 different domains.. so using absolute links it good practice
All this can bed solved a redirect though. Have all http://example.com requests redirected to http://www.example.com
I would recommend linking to "/mollyringwald.html", i.e. with leading slash and always relative to your root directory - e.g. "/directory/page.html". This minimises the chance of the search bot getting confused finding a dead link. I personally don't like using full URLs internally, because it looks messy. On the other hand, Google doesn't care what your text to code ratio is. No, really! Cryo.