Self Referencing Links - Good or Bad?
-
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!
-
Great, as we thought!
Thanks for the explanation, makes even more sense now!
-
Well said. And on that note, I wouldn't trust the SEO advice of an email spammer
-
"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.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Value of having a good crawl budget?
Hi, I've seen several questions where people give advice on how to increase the crawl budget. What I haven't seen anyone comment is what the value of this really is if you have many pages that doesn't get updated very often. Take for example the typical agency page - 50 pages, most of them rarely gets updates. In a monthly basis normally 10% of the website gets updated. Is there really any value then of having 100% of the website crawled on a daily basis?
Technical SEO | | Inevo0 -
Removal of all low PR links
I have a lot of old directory links which where done years ago, most I think will be effecting my site. Is there away to find them all ie through open explorer and then remove them in one go?
Technical SEO | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Unwanted spam pharmacy links
Somebody has been building spam pharmacy links to one of our client sites. I presume they hacked the site and were trying to get their injected pages to rank for pharmacy keywords. The hack appears to be gone now, but we will check more code to be sure. However, we're still left with a bunch of really spammy links, with pharmacy related anchor texts. Anyone had any experience dealing with this? Did the links hurt your rankings? How did you get rid of or mitigate them?
Technical SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
Technical SEO | | Archers0 -
Nofollow link passing link juice
Can a link which is nofollwed pass link juice ? Please see the discussion at - http://www.seomoz.org/q/if-multiple-links-on-a-page-point-to-the-same-url-and-one-of-them-is-no-followed-does-that-impact-the-one-that-isn-t
Technical SEO | | seoug_20050 -
IFRAME WIDGET - FOLLOWED LINKS
<iframe style="border: 2px #CCCCCC solid;" src="http://www.cpsc.gov/cgi-bin/javascripts/cpscrss.aspx" title="CPSC RSS Feed" frameborder="0" scrolling="auto" width="224" height="258"></iframe> That is the code my client wants to add to an internal page where we can keep updated news on a specific subject. Only problem is this widget has links within it, these links are "followed". Should i worry about these links being followed? There are quite a few, does anyone know if they will be counted if within an iframe or is there a way to add "no-follow" attribute to them. Can i somehow tell the HTACCESS to add no follows to all links on specific pages? Any thoughts, solutions are greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | waqid0 -
External Sitewide Links and SEO
I have one big question about the potential SEO value -- and possibly also dangers? -- of "followed" external sitewide links. Examples of these would be: a link to your site from another site's footer a blogroll link a link to your site from another site's global navigation Aside from the link's position in the HTML file (the higher the better, presumably), are these links essentially the same from an SEO point of view or different (and how)? There used to be an influential view out there that the link juice value of a sitewide link was the same as that of a single link (presumably from the linking site's home page), even though a sitewide link may in fact result a huge number individual links. Is this true or false? What is the math here? Should one worry about having "too many" sitewide links, in the sense that this may raise red flags by way of the algo? I talked to someone a few months ago (before the recent algo updates) who believed that he had got a minus 10 penalty or whatever it was for getting too many sitewide links We offer website design and development as well as SEO, and we put a keyworded link to ourselves in the footer. I think this is a fairly common practice. Is this a good or bad idea SEO-wise? One opinion is that for external sitewide footer links, you should best have a dofollow link on the home page, but nofollow it on all other pages. What is your opinion about that? Is there anything else that is distinct, interesting or important about sitewide links' SEO value and pitfalls? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Philip-SEO1 -
What link tracking solution do you use?
What solution do you use to keep track of links that you have acquired or purchased?
Technical SEO | | qlkasdjfw0