Am I right in thinking from an optimisation point of view there is no difference/advantage with either http://www.site.com/ and index.htm when linking internally. Thank you.

Hi Driver I am sure more will get on here soon with a more thorough answer, but i don't have much time right now. If you read this coverage of SES New York 2006 panel on "Duplicate Content (http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/003398.html)" issues you should find some good comments by Jake as well as Matt Cutts that directly relate to this question. Also, please realize that coverage was done "real time," so there may be some typos and incomplete thoughts.

Like I said, I am sure more will come in here to discuss this important topic. (which I moved to the Link Building forum from Google, BTW)

I don't really know the answer to your question, but here is a (hopefully) educated guess.

My understanding is that you should try as much as possible to have all links point to only one url (i.e., there is a difference between the following:

1) www.site.com/
2) www.site.com
3) site.com
4) www.site.com/index.htm

That means that if one person links to www.site.com/ and another to www.site.com and a third to site.com this does not count as three links to one page, but one link each to three different pages. If that is true then there may be an advantage to www.site.com over either www.site.com/ or index.htm if your site attracts links on its own since I assume that people are most likely to use www.site.com over the other options. At least, that makes sense to me. What do other people think?

All the best,

Moshe

Using static (full) URLS internally is important, but consistency is more so.

When a external source links to your site they will use your full URL, by making internal linkage identical to external (inbound) linkage is more likely that a SE would be able to identify those links as pointing to the 'same' page and give the page the appropriate ammount of credit.

I have read the Dupe Content session write up and take notice of the last post and it appears all my internal links should be absolute. Thank you.

There is definitly a difference...the bottom line is that you want to be consistent with what ever you use i.e.

www.abcd.com
www.abcd.com/index.html

and also its is recommended that internally you should link via absolute path and not reletave that is ../index.html

refer to the highlighted text in the image below

http://www.trainingvoucher.com/images/absolute.gif