Should WordPress Post Titles be Permalinked?

Comment on Stallion Responsive WordPress SEO Theme by Erik.

Thanks Dave, that did the trick :)

Yes, certainly I know that it’s a link back to the same page. However I wouldn’t necessarily say that it is negative for the user.

1) One reason is that I think a lot of users are used to and aware that post titles are often links back to the post.

Along those lines, it’s a second option, outside the browser bar url, to easily grab a link if someone wants to share my content or link back to me.

I think the easier I make it to link to me, the better (within reason of course). Some of my content gets a good share of external links and I want to be careful about continuing to encourage that :)

2) Also, depending on the browser bar it may be significantly easier to “right click-copy link address” on post title than to highlight then copy the text in the browser bar.

This could be particularly relevant with mobile browsers. I know firsthand sometimes it is a real pain to highlight text in my tablet touchscreen browser bar with my fat thumbs :) with letters getting cut off at the end, or fingers hitting things I don’t want them to.

Yes, you can often just tap the browser bar area to auto-highlight then select copy, but can be clunky and may not even be an option in some of the many browsers out there I don’t use (I simply don’t know) not to mention on smaller smartphone screens.

Experiences may also vary in other desktop-level browsers with which I have no user experience, where you may have to highlight text manually using mousepads of varying quality.

That aside, post title text is often the largest text on the page (outside of maybe site title) and therefore easiest to lay a thumb on.

It’s certainly happened that I’ve accidentally hit other links (banner ads, other buttons/links in the browser bar area, etc) trying to copy a url out of the browser on my tablet screen.

So for those reasons I think having post title linked can be useful.

3) The other reason I want to keep post title permalinked for now, is that when I make a large change like upgrading to a more advanced theme, I like to control as many variables at first outside of major changes introduced via the theme.

Thus I want to keep post titles linked as they currently are, and for that matter also preserve the visual look even down to small details–so I try to replicate my current site look via CSS changes as much as possible, including even minor things in the sidebars like the look of the recent comments box, etc.

I feel that way I can have a better idea of the impact of certain changes, though I may very well switch this link off at some point.

Removing the post title link does on some level slightly change the link composition of each page though, correct, with one less link back to that page?

You would know better than I whether that is beneficial or not SEO-wise, or if little impact? (obviously I’m assuming if you have it as a recommended setting, it’s probably not going to hurt you :) )

Thanks again for your work in solving this especially with your current PC pains. So soon it’s full speed ahead :)

Erik