A B Testing

Will this harm our SE rankings?

[travelin cat]

We are launching a new site that sells a product, we have devised a few home pages with different sales copy on them and are calling them index_1.html, index_2.html and so on.

The actual index.html page is nothing more then a refresh page with a php script on it to monitor which pages convert.

I was wondering if this will harm us with the search engines as the actual index page has no content besides a reference to a script.

Thanks in advance for any input.

[stapel]

Which page are you planning to "display" to the search engines?

If you display to the search-engine bots the index.htm page, which (if I understand you correctly) is just a "doorway" redirect page, then yes, this could hurt you. But if you display one of the index_N.htm pages to the bots (perhaps using an .htassess redirect to send them to the right place...?), then this might not be so bad.

If I may ask, why do you not want to have a fixed and stable "front door" page on you site? Is it really necessary to "rotate" the pages, rather than just updating the content?

Thank you.

Eliz.

[cabowabo]

I'd exclude it from the engines through the config file, not the robots.txt file, so you keep prying eyes away from what you are testing for. Just keep the engines from seeing it and you'll be fine, but more so than anything, you want to keep to competitors out too.

Cheers,

CaboWabo

[Philosopher]

You mentioned that your actual index is a redirect. What type of redirect?

Are you using the header(location) type redirect? Are you using a readfile, file_get_contents, etc. type of syntax?

The location redirect can cause problems in-and-of iteself because it causes an actual redirect that the engine sees which can cause a lot of problems down the road. I wouldn't recommend it.

A readfile or other similar type of call would be better as there is no actual visible redirect.

In both cases, A/B testing can still cause problems because the engine will be getting different versions of the page with each visit. This means, at the very least, the engines will be scoring the page differently on each visit. In addition, it *could* cause some problems with Google (and possibly others) because the content of the page will be changing often and that alone can cause issues.

[Animated]

your index page will be the one that gets the most credit from the search engines ,if you wana redirect you can try a 301.

[encyclo]

As others have mentioned above, don't redirect, especially not with a meta refresh. It risks hurting you as the spiders will see your root-level index page as blank rhather than your usual content.

You should be using PHP to include the content directly within your index (root-level) page rather than redirecting - you can use cookies to manage which users get which page.

[travelin cat]

Thanks to all of you for your input. This is what I thought. We will just manually test the index page by changing it once a month to monitor performance.