Does anyone know why google sometimes lists backlinks from pages on your own website? I've noticed that some of my competitors pages have this though most don't. As of a few days ago, 4 of my site's ~25 pages are now listed as backlinks. Is this a glitch or is there a reason? one thing that occurred to me is that some of my deeper pages now have backlinks and maybe this is giving my main page juice... but those deeper pages that have backlinks are not the same ones that are listed as links to my main page. Also, am I getting pagerank credit for these backlinks even though they're from my own site?
Depends on if the link is expressed as a full link - like an external link - or not. You will get PageRank - but you might not want it. If you have a lot of pages linked you may want to 'nofollow' some of them in order to ensure that PR is only passed to the pages that are important to you, and not diluted by being shared by too many pages.
Good call magda, I have nofollowed links to pages on my site that I think don't have a lot of value such as contact forms, etc. In my experience optimizing internal links do help, but not as much as getting links from other high quality websites.
what do you mean by a full link? I'm looking at the list of pages that shows up when I either do a google search for link:mysite.com or when I click on "pages that link to your site's front page" in google webmaster tools.