• majorAlexa

        See all notifications

        Skip to content
        Moz logo Menu open Menu close
        • Products
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Pro Home
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Home
          • STAT
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Home
          • Compare SEO Products
          • Moz Data
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis
          • Keyword Explorer
          • Link Explorer
          • Competitive Research
          • MozBar
          • More Free SEO Tools
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO
          • SEO Learning Center
          • Moz Academy
          • MozCon
          • Webinars, Whitepapers, & Guides
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers
          • Agency Solutions
          • Enterprise Solutions
          • Small Business Solutions
          • The Moz Story
          • New Releases
        • Log in
        • Log out
        • Products
          • Moz Pro

            Your all-in-one suite of SEO essentials.

          • Moz Local

            Raise your local SEO visibility with complete local SEO management.

          • STAT

            SERP tracking and analytics for enterprise SEO experts.

          • Moz API

            Power your SEO with our index of over 44 trillion links.

          • Compare SEO Products

            See which Moz SEO solution best meets your business needs.

          • Moz Data

            Power your SEO strategy & AI models with custom data solutions.

          Let your business shine with Listings AI
          Moz Local

          Let your business shine with Listings AI

          Learn more
        • Free SEO Tools
          • Domain Analysis

            Get top competitive SEO metrics like DA, top pages and more.

          • Keyword Explorer

            Find traffic-driving keywords with our 1.25 billion+ keyword index.

          • Link Explorer

            Explore over 40 trillion links for powerful backlink data.

          • Competitive Research

            Uncover valuable insights on your organic search competitors.

          • MozBar

            See top SEO metrics for free as you browse the web.

          • More Free SEO Tools

            Explore all the free SEO tools Moz has to offer.

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic
          Moz Pro

          NEW Keyword Suggestions by Topic

          Learn more
        • Learn SEO
          • Beginner's Guide to SEO

            The #1 most popular introduction to SEO, trusted by millions.

          • SEO Learning Center

            Broaden your knowledge with SEO resources for all skill levels.

          • On-Demand Webinars

            Learn modern SEO best practices from industry experts.

          • How-To Guides

            Step-by-step guides to search success from the authority on SEO.

          • Moz Academy

            Upskill and get certified with on-demand courses & certifications.

          • MozCon

            Save on Early Bird tickets and join us in London or New York City

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints
          Moz API

          Unlock flexible pricing & new endpoints

          Find your plan
        • Blog
        • Why Moz
          • Digital Marketers

            Simplify SEO tasks to save time and grow your traffic.

          • Small Business Solutions

            Uncover insights to make smarter marketing decisions in less time.

          • Agency Solutions

            Earn & keep valuable clients with unparalleled data & insights.

          • Enterprise Solutions

            Gain a competitive edge in the ever-changing world of search.

          • The Moz Story

            Moz was the first & remains the most trusted SEO company.

          • New Releases

            Get the scoop on the latest and greatest from Moz.

          Surface actionable competitive intel
          New Feature

          Surface actionable competitive intel

          Learn More
        • Log in
          • Moz Pro
          • Moz Local
          • Moz Local Dashboard
          • Moz API
          • Moz API Dashboard
          • Moz Academy
        • Avatar
          • Moz Home
          • Notifications
          • Account & Billing
          • Manage Users
          • Community Profile
          • My Q&A
          • My Videos
          • Log Out

        The Moz Q&A Forum

        • Forum
        • Questions
        • My Q&A
        • Users
        • Ask the Community

        Welcome to the Q&A Forum

        Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.

        1. Home
        2. SEO Tactics
        3. Technical SEO
        4. Self Referencing Links - Good or Bad?

        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?

        Technical SEO
        4
        4
        4419
        Loading More Posts
        • Watching

          Notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread.

        • Not Watching

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Show question in unread if category is not ignored.

        • Ignoring

          Do not notify me of new replies.
          Do not show question in unread.

        • Oldest to Newest
        • Newest to Oldest
        • Most Votes
        Reply
        • Reply as question
        Locked
        This topic has been deleted. Only users with question management privileges can see it.
        • O2C
          O2C last edited by

          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!

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
          • O2C
            O2C last edited by

            Great, as we thought!

            Thanks for the explanation, makes even more sense now!

            1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
            • rjonesx. 0
              rjonesx. 0 @ThomasHarvey last edited by

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

              1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 2
              • ThomasHarvey
                ThomasHarvey last edited by

                "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.

                rjonesx. 0 1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 4
                • 1 / 1
                • First post
                  Last post

                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.

                • See all categories

                Related Questions

                • GhillC

                  Broken canonical link errors

                  Hello, Several tools I'm using are returning errors due to "broken canonical links". However, I'm not too sure why is that. Eg.
                  Page URL: domain.com/page.html?xxxx
                  Canonical link URL: domain.com/page.html
                  Returns an error. Any idea why? Am I doing it wrong? Thanks,
                  G

                  Technical SEO | | GhillC
                  1
                • JimLynch

                  CSS background image links bad for seo?

                  On one of the websites I manage SEO for, the developers are changing how our graphical links are coded. They're basically coding in such away where there is no anchor text and no alt tag, so for example: So there's no anchor nor alt context for Google's crawler. How badly will this affect SEO, or is it extremely minimal and I shouldn't worry about? Thanks in advance.

                  Technical SEO | | JimLynch
                  0
                • artdivision

                  The W3C Markup Validation Service - Good, Bad or Impartial?

                  Hi guys, it seems that now days it is almost impossible to achieve 0 (Zero) Errors when testing a site via (The W3C Markup Validation Service - https://validator.w3.org). With analytic codes, pixels and all kind of tracking and social media scripts gunning it seems to be an unachievable task. My questions to you fellow SEO'rs out there are 2: 1. How important and to what degree of effort do you go when you technically review a site and make the decision as to what needs to be fixed and what you shouldn't bother with. 2. How do you argue your corner when explaining to your clients that its impossible to active 100% validation. *As a note i will say that i mostly refer to Wordpress driven sites. would love ot hear your take. Daniel.

                  Technical SEO | | artdivision
                  0
                • ClaireH-184886

                  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 | | ClaireH-184886
                  0
                • yousayjump

                  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 | | yousayjump
                  0
                • Zilla

                  Move established site from .co.uk to .org - good or bad idea?

                  I am currently considering moving our site from the current .co.uk domain to the .org version which we also own. The site is established and indexed for 7 years, ranks well and has circa 10k traffic per month which is mainly UK & US traffic. The reason for the change to the .org domain is to make the site more global facing and give us the opportunity to develop the site into multi language within directories (.org/es/ etc.) and then target those to the local search engines. For the kind of site it is (community based) it wouldn’t really work to split this into lots of separate country targeted domains. So the choice is to either stick with the .co.uk and add the other foreign language specific content in directories within the .co.uk or move to the .org and do the same (there is also a potential third option of purchasing the .com which is currently unused but that could be pricey!) We are also planning a big overhaul of the site with redesign, lots of added content and reorganisation of the site – but are thinking that it would be better to move the domain on a 1:1 basis first with the current design, content and URL structure in place and then do the other changes 2 or 3 months down the line. I have read up on SEOmoz, google guidelines etc on moving a site to a new domain and understand the theoretical approach of moving the site and the steps to take (1to1 301 redirects, sitemaps on old and new etc) and I will retain ownership of the .co.uk so the redirects can remain in place indefinitely. However having worked so hard to get the site to where it is in the search engines and traffic levels I am very worried about whether the domain change is a good move. I am more than happy to accept a temporary fluctuation in rankings & traffic for 1 – 4 weeks as reported may happen as long as I can be sure it will return after a temporary period and be as strong (or almost as strong) as the previous rankings / traffic. Looking for peoples experiences to give me the confidence / reassurance to go ahead with this or any info on why I shouldn’t Thanks in advance for your advice. Adrian.

                  Technical SEO | | Zilla
                  0
                • Archers

                  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 | | Archers
                  0
                • jwdesign

                  Is link cloaking bad?

                  I have a couple of affiliate gaming sites and have been cloaking the links, the reason I do this is to stop have so many external links on my sites. In the robot.txt I tell the bots not to index my cloaked links. Is this bad, or doesnt it really matter? Thanks for your help.

                  Technical SEO | | jwdesign
                  0

                Get started with Moz Pro!

                Unlock the power of advanced SEO tools and data-driven insights.

                Start my free trial
                Products
                • Moz Pro
                • Moz Local
                • Moz API
                • Moz Data
                • STAT
                • Product Updates
                Moz Solutions
                • SMB Solutions
                • Agency Solutions
                • Enterprise Solutions
                • Digital Marketers
                Free SEO Tools
                • Domain Authority Checker
                • Link Explorer
                • Keyword Explorer
                • Competitive Research
                • Brand Authority Checker
                • Local Citation Checker
                • MozBar Extension
                • MozCast
                Resources
                • Blog
                • SEO Learning Center
                • Help Hub
                • Beginner's Guide to SEO
                • How-to Guides
                • Moz Academy
                • API Docs
                About Moz
                • About
                • Team
                • Careers
                • Contact
                Why Moz
                • Case Studies
                • Testimonials
                Get Involved
                • Become an Affiliate
                • MozCon
                • Webinars
                • Practical Marketer Series
                • MozPod
                Connect with us

                Contact the Help team

                Join our newsletter
                Moz logo
                © 2021 - 2025 SEOMoz, Inc., a Ziff Davis company. All rights reserved. Moz is a registered trademark of SEOMoz, Inc.
                • Accessibility
                • Terms of Use
                • Privacy

                Looks like your connection to Moz was lost, please wait while we try to reconnect.