Having tooltips on icons and images is understandable and the same goes for small pieces of links where tooltips may elaborate to the user what that particular link would do. Sometimes, however, people use a tooltip on a textual link which already says exactly the same thing as the tooltip.
Personally I thought this was not a very good idea but seeing that even big companies do so in their web application (gmail, for example, which says 'Inbox' when you mouse over it) I guess there is some valid point.
For example if a website has a link with text 'Home' and when I mouse over it, it says 'Home' in the tooltip. Why is this practiced like this? What is the point?
Answer
It might be for consistency. If users see tooltips on most links/buttons/images, and then they move over something and don't see it, they might wait for it or think the site is broken. Instead of removing the redundant tooltip, it would be better to make useful tooltips for all such elements (or none, if the links are self-explanatory).
This is different from alt. Alt text is used if the image isn't loaded, but sometimes people load images and can't read them (text too small, icon ambiguous, etc). Alt won't help in that case.
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