When we did the TOC test, we noticed that links to itself using # tag links work well and resulted in positive movement. We also know that page linking out will also get a boost. Is there a difference in these types of links or is it just that a url exists on the page? We wanted to see now if a page with a link to itself gets a stronger signal than a page with a link going to another internal page.
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Remember the home to home link that still works? Now, we are doing page to page and we are putting it up against a link going out. Cause we also know that an external link will improve rank. So you’ve got a link leaving your page, we know that that will actually help things so the question is, is there actually a difference between that link going out and that link just going to its own page.
Maybe what Google is looking at is just the existence of the link and it doesn’t matter or is there actually something special to having the page to page link? Is that being counted like another internal link even though it exists on its own page.
The idea is, is it just having hypertext on the page and it doesn’t matter where it is going – to itself or outside – or do you get an actual benefit on this page to page link, kind of mimicking the home to home. This is done by Alex Maggs-Wellings, one of our new testers. He is doing some really great work out of the UK. I liked this set up a lot when he was talking about doing it and I was very excited to have him do this test and make it happen.
He had done some work with table of contents and that is how this came from initially. So we’ve got our page and this is the page that is going to get a link to itself. Then the results were pretty sweet, it moved up. So, the page getting the link to itself moved up a spot against the pages that have the link going out.
All these other pages had an external link and this is the page to page link, which is pretty sweet. Page to page still works, home to home still works, and it is probably not just the existence of that url being on the page but it is actually something to have that link going to itself. It is being counted as a backlink or at least an internal backlink coming to the page, which is pretty exciting.