Does it matter if an internal link has the url structure "../permalink-for-page" instead of the full url "domain.com/permalink-for-page". I've been using the first structure ever since I started my blog and I don't recall why. I believe it had to do with the fact that the second structure gave me disfunctional links, so I went with the other url type. I just found however out that the second stucture does work. So what's better for google? Does it make a difference? The reason I'm asking is because in my google webmaster central it showed me 0 under internal linking. Not sure if I need to worry about that though because when I tested the other url it still showed 0. So I've browsed a few popular blogs, checked the source code and saw that most of them use the second structure for internal links: "domain.com/permalink-for-page". Your feedback is appreciated.
There are pros and cons to using your domain or simply using ../. The downside to including the domain are that it's harder to manage different environments on separate domains or IP addresses (i.e. development, test, production). You can't simply move the site to each domain or IP address and without changing any code. The benefit is that if someone scrapes your content and puts it up on another domain all the links on the page still point back to your domain. Which helps google determine that your site is the original content.
Thanks for your reply freelisttool, but my main concern stated was "What's better for Google?". I mean that from an SEO point of view. Will ../ make it ranger higher than the full domain, vice versa or no difference? Does google recognize/count both types as internal links?
It doesn't matter if you use relative paths (/page.html) or absolute paths (http://www.domain.com/page.html) when it comes to Google or any other search engines. They recognize both equally and from a development stand point it is almost always better to use relative paths.