Warning: if you’re going to implement the technique describe below, do it at your own risk!

That’s right. You can use Google’s own tool, the Website Optimizer, to implement a nice cloaking (well, technically it is not cloaking, but the results will be the same).

So what SEO cloaking mean? Simply put, you display some content to search engine bots and another one humans, with the purpose of manipulating the search engine rankings. Most of the cloaking scripts are identifying the IP of the user agent (humans or search engine bots) and based on a predefined list of IPs of search engine bots will try to guess if the visitor is a bot or human. Others, have bots traps to find robots. Based on the findings, you will setup your web server to  serve the tricky content to SE and nice looking content to humans.

What does Google Website Optimizer do? While the technicalities are not the same, the result is almost the same: it displays two (or more) versions of a page to some visitors, and other content to another visitors. For a simple A/B test 50% of your visitors will see the page A and the other 50% will be automatically redirected to page B (test page). The result of GWSO is almost similar to cloaking: a redirect; while Google will keep the original page in their index and therefore will rank it high, your visitors will see a test page (not necessarily indexed or ranked in search engines, but high converting). Make sure search engine will not index the test page.

Scenario

You rank high with a page, but the page is not converting well. You design another page and run a test to see if it’s performing better. Let’s say it does convert 50% better than the original. However, when you replace the old page with the new one, your ranking will drop and you don’t have enough visitors anymore.

So, how could you balance this? How do you rank high at the same time with having a high converting page? Well, you can use Google’s own tool for the trick (at your own risk, don’t blame me for getting banned).

First, you will run a test and identify a better converting page. Next, run a follow up test and split the traffic 95% to the converting page and 5% to the page that is ranking high. Let the test run for a while (until it conclude and a little more)

This way your high ranking page will show up in SERPs and your converting page will persuade people to act. That’s it. As simple as that!

Honestly, if you continuously test and search for a better converting page, at the same time with keeping the old one live, I don’t see why Google will ban your website. After all that’s the purpose of website testing: continuously testing! However, keep in mind to stop the test and rerun/run another one once you’ve identified a.

Disclaimer: please read Google’s policy on testing and cloaking!

Related posts:

1. Minimize the Impact of Website Testing on SEO
2. Ad and Search Impression Share in Google
3. Who Else Does the Same Mistakes as Search Engine Land?
4. (Extremely) Dirty Competitive Intelligence Technique

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