In WordPress, on most of the templates you'll find, on a single post page the title is linked to itself. Why?!
Admittedly I've not altered this on my blogs yet, this new design has the front page, pages and single posts all powered by the same file so I'll have to put a few conditionals in to check which page it is first.
However I was updating a new client's site today and noticed the difference in the title. Of course I was aware of this before but it only just occured to me, why are they linked? What benefit is there? Perhaps I'm missing something but I can't see the benefit personally. Checking on some blogspot blogs I see the same is used there, so it's not just a WordPress thing. So is there any reason why it's used?
I don't quite understand the behavior either, but I do seem to remember that having pages link to themselves are not beneficial to SEO and might be damaging to your page rankings (though I don't claim to be any sort of SEO guru or anything).
I can understand the damaging possibility. Then again, search engines seem to love blogs despite the mainstream nature of post titles linking to themselves and up to 4 copies of the same post throughout the domain!
Still thanks for reminding me, I just removed the link from the single posts
I can't say that I know the reason either, but it doesn't seem to effect the ranking of the blogs.
I've since come to the conclusion that it's beneficial to leave it there with the rel="bookmark" attribute. Also if someone steals your post, if you've got full links on your title and used within your post then the spam post should at least link back to the original.
It's certainly not a damaging issue though