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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.

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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.
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  • 4
    +1 for the third point - I think the Canonical URL is the main benefit for websites.
    – Toby
    Commented Dec 31, 2011 at 17:23
  • Resubmitting post data can be easily solved by doing a redirect after the POST request.
    – daknøk
    Commented Aug 2, 2012 at 20:14
  • There is no SEO benefit as self-links are ignored by the PageRank algorithm - citation needed
    – Sfisioza
    Commented Dec 30, 2012 at 21:12
  • 2
    @Sfisioza if linking a page to itself increased its PageRank then the entire algorithm would implode.
    – DisgruntledGoat
    Commented Dec 31, 2012 at 1:26
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I don't really use the {link} to get the permalink of a question (I get it from the URL), and usually by this time I have already posted or commented something and the URL looks now like this:

http://example.com/123123#annoyingCommentId666

Clicking the title will clean it and make it ready to be copied and shared with no worries of linking to a comment:

http://example.com/123123

That is really useful for me, I do this more often than you will think

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  • I think DisgruntledGoat covered this in point #3, but still, your example does help clarify this point. +1
    – jmort253
    Commented Jun 20, 2012 at 4:48

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