Self-referencing links

[IPROdigital]

I personally think that self-referencing links are silly. It's blatantly easy for Google to tell and my instinct says that the link juice for this would simply evaporate rather than passing back to itself.

Does anyone have information backing me up from an authoritative source? I can't find any info about this linked to Matt Cutts, Rand or any of those I look up to.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Howdy,

Depends on your definition of self-referencing links, as there are several degrees.

1. Internal links, pointing from one page to another
2. On page anchor links, simply pointing to another part of the same page, usually for navigation purposes
3. Truly self-referencing, where a link simply points to it's own page in an attempt to trick a search engine.

Normal internal links (1) are an important part of any website and give search engines important clues about relevance, site structure, and how to flow signals like PageRank. Internal links are very important for SEO, but also the most easy to abuse, so you can get yourself in trouble if you overdo it with aggressive over linking or over-optimized anchor text. And keep in mind that while internal links are important, they don't pack near the punch as authoritative external links.

Internal anchors (2) such as http://example.com#football are also important for navigation, and Google does use them often for clues about content and structure. You'll often see internal anchors show up in search results, especially for sites like Wikipedia.

Finally, I don't see any value in the truly self-referencing link (3). A page that points to itself seems like a mistake, and using it to game a search engine is most likely a bad idea.

As for authoritative sources, you could look at the 2011 Ranking Factors, which shows that the # of internal links on the page is fairly correlated with high rankings. (and notice the anchor in that link, as well

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO!