Linking strategy - absolute vs relative

[hochusure]

Hi all,

Do search engines know the difference between absolute and relative links?

From what I understand, inbound links have the potential to increase your search engine ranking. What about internal (relative) links within your own website, for example Wikipedia has a gazillion relative links between their articles. Does this help Wikipedia get ranked higher?

[siteadmin]

All search engines first change the URLs to absolute before storing them into their database for ranking factors. Both abolute and relative works fine.