Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
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
-
Subpage with own homepage and navigation good or bad?
Hi everybody, I have the following question. At the company I work, we deliver several services. We help people buy the right second hand car (technical inspections). But we also have an import-service. Because those services are so different, I want to split them on our website. So our main website is all about the technical inspections. Then, when you click on import, you go to www.example.com/import. A subpage with it's own homepage en navigation, all about the import service. It's like you have an extra website on the same domain. Does anyone has experience with this in terms of SEO? Thank you for your time! Kind regards, Robert
Technical SEO | Aug 22, 2017, 8:01 AM | RobertvanHeerde0 -
Spammers created bad links to old hacked domain, now redirected to our new domain. Advice?
My client had an old site hacked (let's call it "myolddomain.com") and the hackers created many links in other hacked sites with links such as http://myolddomain.com/styless.asp?jordan-12-taxi-kids-cheap-T8927.html The old myolddomain.com site was redirected to a different new site since then, but we still see over a thousand spam links showing up in the new site's Search Console 404 crawl errors report. Also, using the links: operator in google search, we see many results of spam links. Should we be worried about these bad links pointing to our old site and redirecting to 404s on the new site? What is the best recommendation to clean them up? Ignore? 410s? Other? I'm seeing conflicting advice out there. The old site is hosted by the client's previous web developer who doesn't want to clean anything up on their end without an ongoing hosting contract. So beyond turning redirects on or off, the client doesn't want to pay for any additional hosting. So we don't have much control over anything related to "myolddomain.com". 😞 Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Technical SEO | May 13, 2016, 3:30 PM | usDragons0 -
Fake Links indexing in google
Hello everyone, I have an interesting situation occurring here, and hoping maybe someone here has seen something of this nature or be able to offer some sort of advice. So, we recently installed a wordpress to a subdomain for our business and have been blogging through it. We added the google webmaster tools meta tag and I've noticed an increase in 404 links. I brought this up to or server admin, and he verified that there were a lot of ip's pinging our server looking for these links that don't exist. We've combed through our server files and nothing seems to be compromised. Today, we noticed that when you do site:ourdomain.com into google the subdomain with wordpress shows hundreds of these fake links, that when you visit them, return a 404 page. Just curious if anyone has seen anything like this, what it may be, how we can stop it, could it negatively impact us in anyway? Should we even worry about it? Here's the link to the google results. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amshowells.com&oq=site%3A&aqs=chrome.0.69i59j69i57j69i58.1905j0j1&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=91&ie=UTF-8 (odd links show up on pages 2-3+)
Technical SEO | Sep 15, 2014, 12:34 PM | mshowells0 -
How can I block incoming links from a bad web site ?
Hello all, We got a new client recently who had a warning from Google Webmasters tools for manual soft penalty. I did a lot of search and I found out one particular site that sounds roughly 100k links to one page and has been potentialy a high risk site. I wish to block those links from coming in to my site but their webmaster is nowhere to be seen and I do not want to use the disavow tool. Is there a way I can use code to our htaccess file or any other method? Would appreciate anyone's immediate response. Kind Regards
Technical SEO | Aug 29, 2013, 11:25 AM | artdivision0 -
Does anyone use pingler and is it any good
Hi, i have joined pingler and pay per month to use it but i have not seen any difference with traffic or google rankings and i would like to know if anyone else is using the paid version of pingler.com and if they find it a good service
Technical SEO | Feb 3, 2013, 10:54 PM | ClaireH-1848860 -
Using Sitemap Generator - Good/Bad?
Hi all I recently purchased the full licence of XML Sitemap Generator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html) but have yet used it. The idea behind this is that I can deploy the package on each large e-commerce website I build and the sitemap will be generated as often as I set it be and the search engines will also be pinged automatically to inform them of the update. No more manual XML sitemap creation for me! Now it sounds great but I do not know enough about pinging search engines with XML sitemap updates on a regular basis and if this is a good or bad thing? Can it have any detrimental effect when the sitemap is changing (potentially) every day with new URLs for products being added to the site? Any thoughts or optinions would be greatly appreciated. Kris
Technical SEO | May 25, 2012, 8:23 AM | yousayjump0 -
Use of + in url good or bad?
Hi, I am working on a SEO project for a client.
Technical SEO | Aug 23, 2011, 12:55 PM | MaartenvandenBos
Some of the urls have a + between the keyword.
like www.example.com/make+me+happy/ Is this good or bad for seo?
Or is it maybe better to use - ? Thanks!0 -
Does the Referral Traffic from a Link Influence the SEO Value of that Link?
If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO? Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic? Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links? 5343313-zelda-rogers-albums-zelda-pictures-duh-what-else-would-they-be-picture3672t-link-looks-so-lonely.jpg Sad%20little%20link.jpg
Technical SEO | Jun 28, 2011, 11:04 PM | glennfriesen1
