Website Optimizer: Impact of A/B Test on Rankings

[johnnie]

Hi all,

A client of ours posed a very interesting question, for which had no immediate answer:

<paraphrase>

what is the influence on SEO when I perform an A/B test using Google's website optimizer?

</paraphrase>

This client reported a massive ranking drop for one of his pages following activation of a test involving a rather radically different variant.

How is this possible? Isn't G supposed to know its own product and recognize the 'original' variant from the website optimizer code? Or have I fallen for the coincidence/causality trap and is there no correlation?

In the meantime, I have advised this client to end the test and move it to a less commercially important page. Whilst this may extend the test beyond its original scope and timeframe, at least the economical risk is minimized.

Any thoughts?

[tedster]

I have heard of people running into ranking problems when using some kind of home brew split testing. But as you say, not with Google's very own solution. I also assumed that they set up the Website Optimizer technology so it wold not cause problems. Could be a very wrong assumption - we know that one area of Google can make problems for other areas - for example, the first AJAX SERPs broke Google Analytics.

a test involving a rather radically different variant

If the ranking problems did come from Website Optimizer, the clue is probably in the phrase "radically different".

Are there any clues about what happened in the cached pages or the client's server logs? If not, I would probably assume the "coincidence/causality trap", as you say.

[BradleyT]

The content on the original URL shouldn't change since it's the control so this doesn't make much sense.

I'd confirm that he has the "old" page set as the one that gets all the traffic and executes the JavaScript that determines which page gets served.