Split testing

without offending google

[Johndem]

Hi,

I'm a little confused.

I want to run a few split tests. But I'm a little affraid google would penalize these pages -since they change rather frequently- and drop the changed pages from the rankings.

Is there a way to work around this?

Thank you
John

[thegypsy]

HI John...

Just make sure to include the GoogleBot in the control group (Page A) and not in the others in the case of split testing or multi variance testing.

Your main concer is duplicate content or redirect type issues. The above will allow you to do the A/B testing without problems.

Is that what you're after?

[Johndem]

Thanks a lot for your answer Gypsy!

Yeah that's what I'm after.

Do you mean that I should include noindex in page B or use robot.txt to exclude it?

Lets say I have two pages I want to split-test page A (which excists for a longer time, and ranks in google) and page B. Now, page B pulls in better results, so I decide to change page A to match page B.

After a while however, there is a new page that pulls better results so I change it again. Will google penalize me for changing the pages so much?

[thegypsy]

Yes. Just exclude the page with either (both for safety sake? Lol)

Changing PAGE A is not going to adversely affect indexing/ranking as long as you don’t COMPLETELY change the relevance of the page. If anything, tweaking and modifying the content would show a ‘freshness’ to the page. A potentially good thing really.

The same works for MVT as well (Multi-Varianance Testing).

[Johndem]

Thanks for your help. That is some good info Gypsy.

Good to know that changing pages isn't necessarily a bad thing.
I will definitly put this in practice.

Thank you!

[moose606]

Matt Cutts actually addressed this in a video recently,
[video.google.com...]

[Philosopher]

Just one thing to add.

I'm not sure how you are running your split tests.

I've seen a few different methods.

1) a server side redirect (302) to either page A or page B

2) a javascript redirect to page A or page B

3) a completely invisible server side rewrite to page A or page B

Ideally, you want to use option 3. Stay away from split testing that requires you to do a visible redirect to your test pages as this redirect can and usually WILL cause a lot of problems with rankings in the engines.

If you use the server side rewrite and add the search engines to the control page, then you should be ok and won't likely have any adverse issues with split testing as the search engines won't see any changes at all during the test.

[Johndem]

Thanks for the extra info.

Any idea how I should set up a completely invisible server side rewrite the way you mentioned?