A real concern anyone involved in A/B/n or multivariate testing should be worried about is what’s going to happen to the search engine optimization (SEO) efforts while, and after the test is done.
If you don’t set up and follow up your tests correctly – and I don’t mean how you setup your testing platform, but the technicalities of how you implement the test on your web server – you can encounter two major problems:
1. Duplicate content issues in search engines. In this case, the control version can be totally excluded from the index or the ranks can decrease
2. Browser bookmarkers. In case if your variation pages change URLs and they are bookmarked by visitors with the changed URLs, once a winner is found and you removed the variations URL, visitors will reach a 404 not found page
To address these issues I do the following:
1. Add the following meta tags in ALL variations of the tested page:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,nofollow,noarchive”>
This will tell search engine spider not to index the page, not to follow the links and not to archive the test page(s) in their index. However, this is not working all the time so,
2. If your tested page changes URL (i.e. testing /olympics.php against /olympics_test.php) you should put the test page(s) under a different directory (i.e. www.mysite.com/testing/) and
3. Exclude tested URLs (complete directory of specific files) in your robots.txt file
To exclude directories use:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /testing/
To exclude just the file use (not recommended):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /testing/olympics_test.php
4. If you’re testing variations using the same page URL with different parameters (i.e. /olympics.php against /olympics.php?test_ver=5) use the rel=”canonical” meta tag, to tell Google and the other search engines that the control page is the page they should index.
I add the line below in the <head> section for all variation pages (i.e. /olympics.php?test_ver=5):
<link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.mysite.com/olympics.php” />
5. Tell you programmers and link builders not to link to your testing directory/page at all (IT should be careful about internal linking, and link builders should not link from external websites)
6. If you plan on testing minisites (more pages under the same testing directory) use “rel=”nofollow” on all internal links of the minisite. Additionally you can put all the links under Javascript so they won’t be followed by search engine bots
7. Once the test is concluded and you found a winner, do a permanent redirect (301) for all tested URLs to the winning URL. For example, in your .htaccess you can add:
RewriteRule ^(.*)mysite.com/testing/olympics_test.php$ http://www.mysite.com/olympics.php [R=301,L]
If you’ll implement all of the above you will have a better chance of not getting into duplicate content issues or ranking fluctuations, due to testing and experimentation.
However, if your pages do get indexed by search engines, you should take the necessary steps to minimize the impact on rankings, as soon as possible:
1. create a Google Webmaster account and keep an eye on your 404 page errors. Eventually ask for the test pages to be excluded from their index
2. create a custom 404.html page, then track and fix 404 errors with the help of Google Analytics. On your 404 error page, add this to your page tracking code:
pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” + document.referrer);
Your code should look something similar to:
<script type=”text/javascript”>
try{
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-xxxxxx-x“);
pageTracker._trackPageview(“/404.html?page=” + document.location.pathname + document.location.search + “&from=” +
document.referrer);}
catch(err) {}
</script>
I hope this will address your boss’ concerns on SEO and it will provide more flexibility for testing!
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