Best way to write href links?

I used to write my internal links using the relative URL (eg "index.html"), but then I thought it might be worth trying the absolute URL (eg http://www.google.com/index.html) to see if it improved my site's search rank since it would increase the number of backlinks to other pages on my site. I haven't noticed a difference yet, and I'm getting a little concerned that using the absolute URL might be seen as an attempt to trick the search engine.

So is using the absolute URL in the href attribute a best practice or an attempt to trick the search engines?

Google and most SEs turn the links into absolute when they are indexed hence why you never see just index.html as a webresult. It wont help you in the rankings.

But I do recommend that when you link you link to the domain name and not the page. Ex: link to www.domain.com and not www.domain.com/index.html That will help your rankings.