Navigation A/B testing and duplicate content

Best practice?

[pmkpmk]

Hi,

in order to do some A/B testing for a sites navigation, I intend to add URL-parameters along the line of:

<a href="internal-page.html?navi=graphic">
<a href="internal-page.html?navi=text">

Those links would be on the same page and they would go to the same page. The only purpose is that in the logfile it shows which of the links has been clicked.

However, the URL parameter makes each of these a unique address so I am fearing a duplicate content penalty from Google. Am I right in fearing this? Any way around it?

[Kufu]

Yes this could easily create a duplicate content problem.

You have two options:

1. use rel="nofollow" within the anchor tag, or
2. use robots.txt to excluse those URLs from the index.