Server-Side A/B Testing - Okay for SEO?

[andrewmeyer]

Hey Moz Community!

I've been digging into the differences between server-side testing and client-side testing and had a generic question. Is it safe to run server-side A/B testing?

For example, if I want to Split Test the home page of a site and show 50% of my traffic one home page, and show 50% of my traffic a completely different (read: new template, new content, new CTAs, etc) home page, are there any implications to SEO and organic search?

I've spent about five hour researching and from what I can find A/B testing is acceptable as long as you don't show Googlebot different content or run A/B tests on Googlebot. Matt Cutts, head of Webspam at Google, has stated that A/B testing does not impact search rankings. "A/B or split testing or other forms of testing web sites is okay by Google as long as you don't test GoogleBot or don't treat GoogleBot differently."

The biggest concerns for SEO cloaking, so from my understanding, for server-side testing, you'd need to do user-agent based redirection so that Googlebot (or any search bot) gets the normal version of the home page. The bots shouldn't be part of the test. Technically that is cloaking, but intention-wise, we're not trying to be sneaky. I've also read through this article about experimentation from Google developers here.

Am I missing anything here or is there a definitive answer? If we serve a “B” as a different site for user testing, just exclude google bot by user-agent and we’re good? THANKS!

[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

Hi,

I wouldn't be worried about this too much, the biggest and smallest sites in the world do A/B testing and most of the big ones run it through the back-end of their site. In all cases you're trying to improve the user experience and make sure they have a better time on your site. I don't worry about this for TNW at least.

[DmitriiK]

Hello, my friend.

Good question you got here. Made my brain leftovers to spin.

Anyway, here is my understanding (and I can be completely wrong).

As Google always says, don't treat Google bot differently from human users, also, they say don't play a/b testing on him. At the same time Google Analytics' a/b testing is working like this: when you visit page for the first time, you get "normal" page, than, based on chance of a/b testing, you either gonna stay or be redirected after loading the page (this one is important) to test page. After this you are being assign a cookie, so every recurring visit you are not "played" with testing until test is complete. Then all cookies are removed and everybody is served whatever version of a/b testing "won".

So, putting three hypothesizes above together, my understanding is that Google bot is being treated the same way - it gets "assigned" (or simply served the original) a version of the page on the first visit. This makes sure that there is no confusion by Google which version of tested page to index.

I think as long as you keep this in mind, there won't be any troubles for SEO.

Hope this makes sense and helps you.

Cheers.