Self Referencing Links - Good or Bad?

[O2C]

As an agency we get quite a few of our clients come to us saying "Ooo, this company just contacted me saying they've run an SEO report on my site and we need to improve on these following things"

We had one come through the other day that had reported on something we had not seen in any others before.

They called them self-referencing links and marked it as a point of action should be taken. They had stated that 100% of the pages on our clients website had self-referencing links.

The definition of self-referencing is when there is a link on a page that is linking to the page you are currently on. So for example you're on the home page and there is a link in the nav bar at the top that says "Home" with a link to the home page, the page you are already currently on.

Is it bad practice? And if so can we do anything about it as it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation. I have not heard anything about this before but I wanted to get confirmation before going back to our client and explaining.

Thanks Mozzers!

[O2C]

Great, as we thought!

Thanks for the explanation, makes even more sense now!

[rjonesx. 0]

Well said. And on that note, I wouldn't trust the SEO advice of an email spammer

[ThomasHarvey]

"it would seem strange from a UI point of view not to have a consistent navigation."

You hit the nail on the head, imagine is a website like Amazon removed the link on their logo to the homepage from the homepage, some people click this on the homepage just because they're confused and if they don't see a page refresh they may be upset. It's also a LOT more work to implement this.

I would argue a consistent navigation is good, as Google likes to follow a good structure, it's just causing you potential problems, what if you're using a CMS and you're on the blog, then you go to a blog article, do you remove the blog menu link as you're within the blog? There's just no real reason I can personally see for it.