Different CSS based on cookies

Possible penalty?

[onebaldguy]

Recently we have been working on our conversion rates. For now, we have been staying away from tweaking the content on the landing pages because we don't want to risk losing our rankings. So we have wanted to try new layouts (colors, etc).

Since our conversions change on a daily basis, we want to do an A-B test. Half of the users that come in a day will get a certain page layout, and the other half with get another page layout.

When a user comes to the page, can we assign them a cookie and then have a variable in the cookie decide what layout the user would see without risking getting slapped with a cloaking penalty? The variable would only change what css file was used and would only change the layout (not any content).

[volatilegx]

Sure, why not? I don't see why Google would penalize for this. The content of the page wouldn't change, only the stylesheet. There's certainly nothing wrong with serving different stylesheets to different visitors. This sort of thing is done all the time, but usually based on what type of browser the visitor is using. In your case, instead of basing the decision of which stylesheet to use on the browser, you're basing it on a random number.

[j4mes]

It's fairly easy to set cookies just with Javascript, which makes things very easy for you, but you'll have to navigate over to the Javascript forum for help with that :)