Linking a page to itself

[realmaverick]

I used a well known drop down menu for one of my websites.

From my main navigation. There are about 10 items, that link to a href="#". These items are for example "Community" which opens a drop down leading to forums, members etc. Community itself isn't a clickable item.

But what it means, is that every single page, has 10 links, linking to itself, with irrelevant text.

I didn't realise the issue existed, until I ran an SEO spider tool which showed blue-widgets.html being linked to with tons of irrelevant text.

I don't know for sure, how Google will interpret this.

I'm going to fix it now. Do you think this may have caused damage?

[deadsea]

Google does not pass pagerank across href="#" type links. I've tested that. I haven't tested anchor text specificialy, but I would assume that if they are not passing pr across the link they are also not passing anchor text.

[realmaverick]

Interesting. I've removed them anyway just incase. Thanks for the response.

[tedster]

Google does not pass pagerank across href="#" type links.

Did your tests uncover whether that kind of link changes the base PageRank for other links on the page? I do not yet have a definitive answer question on that so far, but the data I do have seems to say that href="#" links do increase the divisor, lowering the value of any other link on the page. In other words, it gets evaluated like a nofollow link.

[realmaverick]

That makes sense.

[GlobalMax]

Google does not pass pagerank across href="#" type links. I've tested that.

You're talking here about literally href="#" links -- not every hash-marked link, right? Surely <a href="http://www.example.com/index.html#topic-a>Topic A</a> does pass pagerank.

[tedster]

I took this discussion to be about links that call a JavaScript function onclick, not links that point directly to page fragment identifiers.

[deadsea]

href="#" do NOT increase the divisor, pr DOES get passed to other links on the page. This appears to be a special case. href="#offset" does increase the divisor.

Another common "null link" pattern behaves the same way:
href="javascript:;"
It does not pass any pagerank, nor reduce the amount of pagerank available to other pages.

[epmaniac]

So guyz, what is the conclusion, is it ok to use href="javascript:void(0);" instead of href="#" or neither of the above should be used?

[koan]

Well that could actually be a good question for Matt Cutts' videos.

[deadsea]

While it appears to be href="#" style links with an onclick that sets the location.href, don't pass pagerank, they appear to violate the spirit of Google's algorithms. It would not surprise me if Google changed their algorithm or even started penalizing sites that do it too much.

[Alex_TJ]

Deadsea, thanks for the info. I remember from another thread you did some tests.
I use page fragments both for anotherpage.htm#here as well as to refer to fragments on the same page. It seems strange that self-referring page fragments with #something are throwing away PR, much the same as nofollow links.
Anyone else done any tests on this?

[aakk9999]

@tedster:

I do not yet have a definitive answer question on that so far, but the data I do have seems to say that href="#" links do increase the divisor, lowering the value of any other link on the page. In other words, it gets evaluated like a nofollow link.

If I understood well what you are saying, then bookmarking from within the page lowers PR your page passes to other pages? I can understand why it would be wise to be ignored in PR & anchor passing when linking to anchor within own page, but it seems unfair if it is just PR black hole.

Meaning that because of SEO effect one should not use bookmarks within own page even though it would make a sense to a visitor, especially in cases where the bodycopy is longer. So as a result you are inclined to break such page into two (or more) as that way PR would still be passed and circulated.

[tedster]

Sorry for any confusion. In this thread we weren't talking about links to fragments of the same page - I don't think they increase the divisor because they are not pointing anywhere else. We were talking about JavaScript "links" in a drop-down menu that initiate a function. To calrify:

<a href="#fragmentname"> does not seem to increase the "number of links" divisor.
<a href="#" onclick=[some function]> does seem to increase the "number of links" divisor.

This is a very tricky area to test, because Google has made so many changes to the way PR is calculated that I might be running into some other factor that I'm not accounting for.

If Google is really getting tripped up by this relatively common coding situation I'd be more than surprised - they've moved beyond the most common edge cases like this. However, I wouldn't be surprised that an "SEO spider tool" might have problems, such as the one mentioned in the first post.

[aakk9999]

Hi Ted, thanks for clarifying, for a moment I was worried!

[Alex_TJ]

Deadsea

href="#" do NOT increase the divisor, pr DOES get passed to other links on the page. This appears to be a special case. href="#offset" does increase the divisor.

Could you please clarify this a litle? It seems to be different from Tedster's statement, so maybe I've introduced some confusion into this thread by getting the wrong end of the stick.
According to your tests, does href=# refer to self-referring page fragments or js only, as in the OP's question? Does href=#offset refer to another page or the same page?
Thanks

[deadsea]

My testing shows the opposite of what tedster just said.

<a href="#" onclick=[some function]> does *not* seem to increase the "number of links" divisor.
Neither do other types of self links and javascript links on example.com/thispage.html:
href="thispage.html"
href="javascript:;"
href="./thispage.html"
href="http://example.com/thispage.html"

href="#fragment" are a different case. It appears that such links can pass pagerank in some circumstances. I know Google is trying to direct users deep into anchors in wikipedia articles. They may have some special pagerank code that actually handles page fragments and passes pagerank to a section of a page.

[aakk9999]

<a href="#" onclick=[some function]> does *not* seem to increase the "number of links" divisor.

Just curious - where were you obtaining "number of links" divisor information from?