A "Trackback" is an auto-citation feature that allows solitary webloggers to feel as if they are part of a community. It's a cunning trick that allows the reader to indicate that they've read a weblog entry, or as the official description from MovableType has it: "Using TrackBack, the other weblogger can automatically send a ping to your weblog, indicating that he has written an entry referencing your original post."
The original blog then sprouts a list of "trackback" entries from other webloggers who have read, and linked to the original article. Kinda neat, huh? Except for one unforeseen technical consequence: the Trackback generates an empty page, and Google - being too dumb to tell an empty page from the context that surrounds it - gives it a very high value when it calculates its search results. So Google's search results are littered with empty pages.
Try this OS X Panther Discussion for size: it's a Google query for OS X Panther discussion. In what must be a record, Google is - at time of writing - returning empty Trackback pages as No.1, No.2, No.3 and No.4 positions. No.5 gets you to a real web page - an Apple Insider bulletin board. Then it's back to empty Trackback pages for results No.6, No.7 and No.10. In short, Google returns blog-infested blanks for seven of the top entries.
Wow. There are unintended consequences for lots of things, but that's an interesting one....
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