When a page points to itself?

does that count as a vote for PR?

[cicru]

I was doing some research on a new project and I noticed that some competitors are just using the

<a href='current page'> KEYWORD/S </a>

and looks like it is working for them ....

there is not even a # in the URL (bookmark)

[steve]

While working on a set of pages on a site I had a LHS navigation bar that pointed to all pages in the set, including the page it was on.

The pages ranked reasonably.

When I was finished I cleaned up the nav. bar, removing the link to the page it was on.

The pages moved *ever so slightly* up the SERPS.

From this I assumed that a page voting (linking) to itself was frowned on by the searchengines.

[shinyblue]

Having a navigational scheme in common across all pages is a very standard practice. If you do that, every page linked to in your nav bar will be subject to that effect, unless you have it set up so that the link for the page you are on is not active. Most people don't bother doing that. Would Google frown on such a common practice?

[sit2510]

>>> When a page points to itself?

I think the effect is too small for ones to worry about it.

>>> Most people don't bother doing that. Would Google frown on such a common practice?

Shinyblue is right - most people don't bother about it. There are plenty of pages pointing to themselves and rank greatly in Google.

However, Steve's comment may makes sense and it could be interesting to see another side of the coin...Look at G's example - [google.com...]

[pete_m]

cicru - I doubt that the link-to-self will significantly affect PR, but it's certainly possible that the anchor text is counted.

I'd hope that Google's algorithms would disregard all links to the same page, but you never know...

[buckworks]

I was doing backlink checks yesterday and came across some instances where the page itself was listed as a backlink in Yahoo. So, such links seem to be noticed, at least by Yahoo.

That doesn't say anything about about they're weighted, though.

[webnewton]

Buckworks is right.
It's definately a plus to have one such link on the home page regardless of how much importance it's being give by a search engine. So better to have one such link.