The research to rise to the top of the front page of Google has been going on for decades. The first few results shown on search engines or first response from an AI search agent can bring opportunity. Unfortunately, the perfect optimization formula is often a mixture of analysis, guessing, superstition, or trial and error. Making it even more difficult are the changing standards of what is allowed or not to reach the higher rankings.
Today we will be covering a new change at Google that has been popular in e-commerce. Many sites use it as a chance to offer a coupon or prevent an abandoned cart? What can you do instead? Read on to find out
The PageRank Past to Modern SEO
One of the first efforts to judge site quality is the (in)famous PageRank. This lead to an era of paid linkbacks, forum/blog comment signature links, and thousands of similar efforts to increase the number of quality links to your site. It also helped create an industry of robots spamming everything from forums to page analytics hoping to be listed on a public page. The SEO spam efforts have only gotten more advanced since in the age of AI agents.
SEO has moved on from basic link sharing to content optimization down to the color of the font posted. The metrics used vary from industry secrets to up to the second AI agent lead research. With each new Google search index update, they become less effective pushing sites to find the latest technique. AI agents have supercharged these efforts against classic search.
The back button block
Google recently added a rule to make back button hijacking a spam technique. This has been used maliciously before, but some e-commerce sites use it as a way to offer a coupon to stop an abandoned cart. Is it time to give up the cart protection?
Fortunately, Google search spiders don’t reach the final pages of your order checkout flow. By limiting the technique to targeted dynamic cart pages, you avoid the spam technique block as these pages should already be excluded via robots.txt or other blocks. As an extra, You can also look into mouse tracking techniques that trigger when the user’s mouse approaches the corner to close the window or browse away.
We hope this helps you reach higher in Google and protect your position. Stay tuned for more WordPress and optimization.