Why, on StackExchange sites, is the post title on the question page a link to itself?

Question

It may look like a question for meta.stackoverflow.com, but I'd like to know if this decision has something to do with SEO or if this improve the user experience somehow.

It's a link to the same page you are, so I don't see the usefulness of this.

On Quora, for exemple, on the question page, the question title is not a link.

Answer 1

There is no SEO benefit as self-links are ignored by the PageRank algorithm. However, this is often done (on other sites and blog posts too) for a couple of reasons:

1. It allows you to refresh the page quickly, and in some instances without the warning that you are resubmitting postdata.
2. Similarly you can re-request the page from scratch, useful if you for example posted a comment with AJAX, navigated to another page, clicked back and the browser showed the old page.
3. It provides access to the true, canonical URL, without query string parameters and the like. And quick access to right click and copy the link address, eg for sharing.