For example, I have a navigation in the top of the page. Home > Category > Product If I were at the product page, I would also create a link to the product page itself as well. Personally it's useful for me, I'd rather prefer refreshing page clicking on page links instead of F5 combination. Some people tell me it is bad for SEO. I don't find any objective reasons why I should not do that. What do you think?
Hey there, I do that on my own site as well. If you are really worried about it, you can put a rel="nofollow" tag on the Product link. I am not sure if it is counted as an outbound link, but having this tag ensures that PR gets shifted to the Category and Home page links. Hierarchal designs are great. If you have a structure like that it will be great for PR. Best of luck. Sincerely, Travis Walters
I suspect that once on a page is not going to have much effect, good or bad. You get a link with a keyword, fine, but it points to itself, so what's the point? At best, the spider will ignore it; at worst, you'll send the it into a loop and it may be kept from continuing on through your site. From a usability POV, breadcrumbs are great, but there isn't any need to link the last item in the trail if it is the same page you are on. Why would you need to refresh the page? If you were keyword spamming and doing it all over the page, of course that's a different story.
Thank you for your answer. I am not talking about keyword spamming or any anchor text behind the link. twalters84's advice to use nofollow has a point. chorizo, what about this situation. There is a some page on ebay or any other site which [page] is very dynamic. Instead of using F5 I always click on "Home", this is just a kind of habbit. I guess a lot of people do this.
@temp2: it looks like there's a variety of opinion on whether a page should link to itself. Sometimes you can't avoid it - like having a table of contents or showing the 'home' navigation link on the home page. There does seem to be some consensus that it won't do anything for your rankings. It seems similar to a named anchor linking to a point futher down the page... A few bits of opinion that I found: http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cach...f"&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=10&gl=uk&client=firefox-a http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3445040.htm http://209.85.129.104/search?q=cach...lf"&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=6&gl=uk&client=firefox-a So to the original point: it's probably not going to hurt the overall SEO for the site, but it doesn't look like it will specifically help, either.
OK, I take your point on ebay, where someone might be refreshing the page to see bid price increasing...though you'll note that they have a specific 'refresh' link on all active item pages. My other response above has some links to a few opinions on a self-referential link like this...seems like people think it will not necessarily help nor hurt your SEO, which means you might as well give it a try!
Thank you for your interesting discussion. The thing about nofollow tag. Wouldn't you think it will be confusing when I will place the same link, for example "/buy/", in two different places with nofollow tag, and the second one without it. If I were robot I wouldn't understand how come the same link can be interpreted differently. The reasonable use is with different parameters, like "/buy/?reverseorder" I think.
Personally I think it is unnecessary and therefore I would avoid it. Breadcrumbs are much more useful if the user is aware of their current location and linking to the page again will only complicate the issue. If there is any benefit (and I'm talking in terms of SEO here) it will be minimal. I'd rather score more usability points. - Matt