Why on sites like Stack Overflow, Techcrunch, Smashingmagazine, etc. are the page titles (i.e. the text at the top of the page) clickable URLs that redirect to the same page that the user is on?
Some examples:
I believe that this does not effect SEO as search engines ignore internal links.
Is it for usability purposes?
It allows you to right-click on it and choose Copy link location (or equivalent) so that you can easily paste it in an email for example. This requires less time than copying it from the location bar, and some people run their browser without a visible location bar to save previous screen space.
The URL redirects to the beginning of the page, in case you arrived on the page via a specific answer (all answers are also clickable URLs). This way, you get the URL of the question, not of an answer.
Yes Jakob Nielsen has stated that linking to yourself is a web design mistake (nr 10). And I agree.
More reading info here. (nr 10)
Not sure if this is why they did it, but I find it useful to siphon off tabs:
If I look at something briefly and think "I'd like to read this thoroughly in a minute but continue with what I was doing before", I can do this:
I can right click the link, click "open in a new tab" and then click "back" and continue nicely.
I think it inherits the behavior from CMS where each question is a node, which has 0<= answered question. Now think you go for a search on apache questions. The result are displayed one after another. In terms of CMS this is called a teaser. You get a full page with lots of questions where the question's title link to the full article(question + answers)
Its not a must, but you'll find it on most sites which uses a CMS.
As long as it does not harm anyone why would people be against it?
I prefer to have those links available as hitting refresh would reload all elements of the page instead of just following the direct link (to the same page) that uses cached elements.
Makes sense to me, I find it useful! I have a lot of tabs open so I just right click the link and go back.
To me this makes perfect sense, from a SEO view this is also good! It forces it to read the page because it's linked.
More than anything, it provides a link to the default state of the page.
For example, for this very stack overflow page it is a user can get here through any of the following non-default links:
While the default link is actually:
If users are unable to get to the default state, they end up bookmarking or emailing the non-default link which propagates to new users and the problem just multiplies.
Clicking on the title link of the post will restore the default state and strip off any query parameters (?sort=date), named anchors (#foobar) and fix the story slug (/why-are-page-titles/...).