Self referencing link

[wheel]

On my home page, I'm doing something kinda spammy. And by spammy, I mean it seems to work just fine thank you very much.

I wanted to rank on some regional terms, but didn't want to throw up all those blocks of states with individual pages that you see around. They just seemed to spammy for my tastes.

So I put up a paragraph on the homepage talking about say 'red widgets in oklahoma'. Then I link those words (red widgets in oklahoma) right back to the homepage. In other words, my homepage links to itself, with some nice juicy text.

And guess what? Despite no other backlinks with text to do with oklahoma, my site ranks #1 or 2 for red widgets in oklahoma.

Are there any variations on this that might work better? Are circular links like this commonly used?

[wheel]

Except I don't have breadcrumbs. I have a few paragraphs of content talking about 'red widgets idaho' and use that text to link to the same page.

[fom2001uk]

Wheel, is this keyword-rich self ref link the first link (to your homepage) that appears on your homepage? Or do you have another homepage link ("Home" for example) that appears before it?

[wheel]

My nav menu is prior to the content, and includes a home link.

[fom2001uk]

If your nav home link is a text link (e.g "home"), then that's the anchor text assigned to it by Google. Any other link on the page pointing to the same page is ignored for anchor text purposes. As far as I know, you only get 1 anchor text per page, for any one destination page.

Of course if your nav home link is a graphic, then your keyword-rich link to homepage then becomes your first anchor text, and is the one that counts.

[claus]

So, in your normal navigation links you refer to the page in question simply as "Home" (in the anchor text) ?

If that is the case I can see why Google would want to look for a more meaningful description of the page content. The word "Home" must be the most used link text of all among English-language pages.

However, that does not mean that the on-page link was the reason for the rank. The rank is probably caused by the site being quite strong already (before you added the new link).

My guess is that it ranked OK for "Home" before the change (relative to the competition that would be multiple times tougher for the phrase "Home"). So, now - with the descriptive anchor text - Google has a better idea what the subject of the page is.

[wheel]

I originally did this just to rank for some secondary regional terms - and I'm #1 on the two regional terms that are on my homepage (those two terms of course being links to the homepage).

Perhaps I should try ranking on some other, more competitive terms by doing this.

Perhaps others should try it - pick your favorite search term contained on your homepage, and link right back to your homepage.

I might give that a whirl. I don't know that we've proven anything, but it's definitely some food for thought - and maybe an easy way to get some boost on some nice search terms.

[Silvery]

By the way, I tested this in comparison to adding text onto a webpage and see very little difference. Yes, the self-referencing link passed the keyword text, so the page began ranking upon that signal, where it did not previously. However, adding new text to the homepage accomplished the very same thing.

[marycontrary]

Wheel...just curious, how is your experiment shaping up, now that it's been 2.5 months since the last discussion on this topic.

Please advise, I really want to know!

[wheel]

For the three terms on the home page where I link back to the home page, for the first term I mention I'm number 3, for the second term I'm #2, and for the third term I'm #1.

My overall rankings aren't as hot as they used to be though, things have taken a bit of a hit.

[vegasgirl]

I used to do this 4 years ego, in one of our websites. Each page's h1 was a recursive link to itself. And it worked.

The point is, I made sure not overdo it. The link's anchor text is relevant (similar to the page's title), and only did this once on each page.

I think if you'd stick to these rules you'll be fine (even better then fine).