Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by SEO Dave.

Stallion WordPress SEO Package Linking to self (the page you are already on) is unlikely to have a major DIRECT SEO impact either way, but it’s another one of those SEO concepts that’s difficult to test, so fall back on common sense.

This is how I see it Google SEO wise.

Lots of webpages link to themselves, there’s nothing intrinsically black hat SEO self linking, so Google is highly unlikely to treat self links in a negative SEO way.

Is there any search engine user value in self linking Google might perceive? Google uses links as a vote for the page, link to a page and you are voting it’s a good webpage to visit, but you are linking to the page the are already on, in effect voting for yourself and in most god voting systems voting for yourself is discounted.

My best SEO guess would be Google ignores self links as a direct SEO factor (doesn’t pass PR back to self or anchor text benefit) since they add no user value.

That being said what about indirect SEO value, users do click the WordPress permalink title ones quite a lot (it’s a relatively high percentage when active) and Google is trying to take user experience and this sort of ‘real’ data more into account.

If your users are clicking on the self link at a very high rate (see your Google Analytics data) that will push down the click through percentage of other links from the page.

If Google considers click through rate now or in the future as an important SEO metric having self links will push the CTR of other pages down suggesting users don’t like what you are linking to.

So I have them turned off, but don’t have real SEO test data to backup my action.

David