Live Site Testing and Search Engines

How will search engines react to site testing where content is changing

[Spaceghost]

Planning on doing some live testing for a site where visitors will randomly get either the old version of the site or the new version. Page layout and content will be signficantly different across the two versions.

I'm wondering how search engines may react to this. The site gets spidered fairly often, but I wonder how the search engines will react when getting two completely different versions of the site within the same day for a set period of time.

Any thoughts or previous experience with this issue?

Thanks.

[specter]

Are the two version under the same domain name?
Are there subdomains? Subdirectories?Parked domains?
How does it change the content?

[Dave_A]

Well for my part, my search engine probably wouldn't return that often, the web spider is programmed to return to check the content of a spidered site every three days.
In the cases that I have seen of this, it has been when a website changes a photo of "Bo peep" into a photo of "@###" that makes the eyes water.
They seem to scan the log files and once the spider has visited they change the content thinking it will be safe for about a week.
This is one way some people try to fool search engines into pulling visitors into Porn websites.
If a web site keeps changing it's content too often then in heaps of cases we want to know why?
We follow a strict no porn policy and we are used to people trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Not that I am suggesting that you may be doing this, but I am trying to show you things from a search engines angle..
Hope this helps
Dave A

[Spaceghost]

Yes, the two versions will be at the same domain, same URLs, etc. The two versions of the page will just be randomly served.

[specter]

I share the conclusions of DaveA:
It could be recognized simply as a spam issue and result in a banning/blacklisting of your site.