I came across a post written today on a blog that I frequent, and it intrigued me enough to both post on the blog and to offer the same food for thought up for discussion.

The blogger (SEO Buzzbox's Aaron Pratt) mentions the habit that some SEOs have of referring to their own information/past posts/forum discussions and how it may or may not be used for search engine benefit.

It's an interesting suggestion, in that there may be some truth to it (although if there is, I tend to believe that it would be a short-term loophole.)

The blog post...

The part that seemed most interesting to me, I wonder if other people caught? He said that a lot of people in the SEO community take "ownership" of SEO terminology in search results. ( I would personally think it's more a matter of people are really aggressive about marketing their keywords. )

I also participate in Wikipedia, because I think knowledge is a good thing, and having a free resource is good for society. A lot of editors there take "ownership" of pages they've worked on. Even helpful edits to about 1/3 the pages on Wikipedia will be reverted within minutes if they're not first listed on the "talk" page and given the approval of the in crowd. To be it's an interesting parallel, to think of "ownership" of an encyclopedia article, or a search term. Either way, it's probably bad for the public as a whole.

Back to the point, though. I would think it's pretty natural for a web site to link back to itself with targeted anchor text, but in a natural-sounding way. I would also think these wouldn't help all that much for search placement, because they're internal links instead of external ones?

That's just it...they're not only internal links. A lot of these types of people have a way of referencing themselves at every opportunity they can get. Wall's a classic example...any time he has an answer, it's out with the seobook.com/answer page here, rather than just tell someone.

Oh, I see. That must get annoying, no?

I think if I saw someone give a lot of good advice, and reference things, well, whenever a key handful of people on this forum tell me to see a link, I do it. And normally, it's a link to a bunch of info that's just too big to fit into the discussion at hand. I tend to appreciate that type. The other kind, though, what you're describing, I think I'd just go blind to the guy. Like when bloggers talk about "ad blindness."