AB Testing & SEO

I am considering an AB Test but I’m afraid of negative SEO repercussions

[ErikaDykstra]

I am redesigning my site and planning to do AB Testing before launching the new design, but I am afraid of how the search engines will perceive my AB test. Specifically, I am afraid that they may consider my test to be a "sneaky redirect" or cloaking. Below is the process I am planning to use. Does anyone know how this will be perceived by the search engines?

- A percentage of incoming traffic will be 302 redirected to a beta site, "beta.widgets.com" (our primary domain = "www.widgets.com")

- Identified bots/crawlers will not be redirected

- All "beta.widgets.com" pages will be blocked from indexing via Robots.txt

- "widgets.com" will continue to live untouched during the beta testing

Any other advice on SEO and AB Testing? Is there a safer way to AB Test?

[volatilegx]

There's currently another thread on this topic here: [webmasterworld.com...]