Most bloggers, even techie types, don’t fully understand trackback pings and their use. So, for those of you new to this “Trackback” thing, here’s a good Trackback Tutorial that discusses the basics (particularly as they pertain to the popular blogging software WordPress).   

I have to believe the reason why black-hats like trackback links is they typically don’t use the rel=”nofollow” attribute (though some are starting to now), which means the link actually passes link “juice” to the entity that issues the trackback. 

Am I right that search engines have learned to recognize links found in the “Comments” sections of blog posts, and are heavily discounting these types of links even if they don’t contain the nofollow attribute? If so, then why are black-hatters are still using trackbacks to spam blogs to this day, even though this technique of spamming has been around for years?

The trackback specification intent was to spur online discussions between blogs, but certainly it’s opened a can of worms. 

Comments / Trackbacks anyone?

Though we’re primarily a direct marketer, we occasionally are challenged with building more traditional web sales tools — like a home-grown shopping cart.

In my quest to do something different with the front-end navigation of the cart, I came across a fancy-worded type of navigation called Facet-Based Navigation.

With facet-based navigation, unlike a simple traditional hierachical category scheme, shoppers have the ability to drill down to products based on mutiple dimensions (or facets).

For example, a potential web customer shopping for jewelry may be interested in browsing by particular Type of jewelry (Earrings, Necklaces, Bracelets, etc…), while others are more interested in browsing by a particular Material (Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc…). ”Type” and ”Material“ would be examples of facets, while earrings, necklaces, gold, silver and the like would be facet values.  What’s more, if products are assigned multiple facets, shoppers can refine selections using these facets to help us locate just “Silver Necklaces” or “Platinum Earrings“.

How Does this Help SEO?

Well…  good question!  For our implementation, our client wanted us to build an online furniture store.

Since we’re lazy, and didn’t want to do all the keyword research to try and figure out which keywords were most important.  We thought, “Why not build a navigation system that does all of the keyword stuff for us?”

So here we go…  since most furnishings and furniture items have the following facets:

• Item (Beds, Dressers, Chests, Armoires, etc…)
• Room (Bedroom, Living Room, etc…)
• Type (Sleigh, Platform, Teen, etc…)
• Material (Iron, Wood, Leather, etc…)
• Manufacturer (Bassett, La-Z-Boy, etc…)
• Color (Cherry, Mahogany, etc…)
• Size (Twin, Full, Queen, King, etc…)
• Style (Tradition, Shabby Chic, etc…)

We set up a facet-based data navigation model accordingly. 

Now, check out the long-tail search terms we get!  For instance, looking for a wood sleigh bed?  How about a contemporary chest? Or, maybe a contemporary black wood twin sleigh daybed? Each browsed page constructs itself off of the previous traits’ selection, allowing us to create optimized pages for keywords on the fly.  Make sense?

What’s more the search engines should not consider this spam. On the contrary, we’re classifying products for them, which should only help in their relevancy for searches. We’re also able to build title tags and meta tags pertinent to each of selected facet values. For example, the contemporary black wood twin sleigh daybed page we talked about earlier has the following HTML:

<title>Contemporary Black Wood Twin Sleigh Daybeds : Decor South</title>

<meta name=”description” content=”Find, shop and buy Contemporary Black Wood Twin Sleigh Daybeds.”>
<meta name=”keywords” content=”contemporary black wood twin sleigh daybeds daybed”>

 Now we’d just need to write some great content for the page, right?

So, What’s the Problem?

Well, there’s really no problem, until I started playing the the navigation.  As it turns out, we’ve accidently built a very racist website.  For example, check out:

• White Girl’s Headboards
• Black Baby Furniture & Home Furnishings

It appears putting a few of the facets values together in the wrong order can result in some polarizing language.

In Conclusion 

Regardless, I hope this helps some of you when brainstorming for ideas to help with SEO of your shopping cart (constructing keywords, long tail searches and the like).

I’m sure we’ll be hearing from Rev. Al Sharpton soon.

 Though I’m not at liberty to discuss our new creations just yet (silly lawyers), you should be getting a taste of pumpkin goodness in the coming months.

 I’m not sure exactly what the breakdown of cash Google receives via its partner network of AdSense publishers, but I can’t imagine the conversion rate is good for any of the advertisers. 

So why do advertisers keep insisting on running their Google PPC campaigns and allowing their ads to be displayed on Adsense publisher’s sites?  I believe it’s due to the fact that advertisters don’t watch or have any type of decent conversion reporting.

 Why am I saying all of this?  Well, I believe the efficacy of PPC text link ad’s on publisher’s sites  is slowly dying.  More and more web surfers are becoming numb to the sight of Google ads shown next to (in and around and over) content.

 Remember the advent of the web banner?  The click thru rates were ridiculous at the outset, but were slowly driven into the ground over time — after the surfer discovered they were just annoying.

 I still believe that Google needs to implement a PPA type of ad.  Of course they won’t anytime in the near future — not until PPC campaigns start shrinking due to advertisers actually monitoring their conversions.