SEO aspects of A/B testing

[Raf_Mertens]

Hi,

Hypothetical scenario:

You want to try out the long term effects of a different layout, and decide to serve 1 out of 500 users this new layout. You remember the randomly assigned 'beta' visitors, so that you can keep serving them the new layout and track their long term behavior.

If one of Google's bots is one of the 'beta' visitors, and another one is not, they might interpret this as if you're trying to mislead them?

What is the safest way from an SEO perspective to do this?

Thank you in advance,

Raf

[goodroi]

Can you better define long term? Are you talking a month, a year, forever?

[Raf_Mertens]

About 2/3 months

[jakegotmail]

Google offers the testing that you are talking about -- [url]www.google.com/intl/en/websiteoptimizer[/url] -- so I doubt that there would be SEO implications unless the method you use to do the testing is severely out of the ordinary (not to be read as, "unless you don't use Google").

[RedCardinal]

Most testing suites will handle bots so that they don't see variations. Unless your doing some sort of server-side segmentation you generally have nothing to worry about.

Serving 1 in 500 visitors may require quite serious traffic in order to return significant results.