Google’s John Mueller recently answered a question about A/B testing web pages for long durations, warning that an unintended consequence is that enabling variations to be indexed can result in uncertainty as to which will be visible in the search results.
A/B Testing Traffic From Live Search Results
A/B testing is when one or more versions of a web page is shown to users. The reason for doing this is generally for testing conversion rates and user responses.
The important takeaway from the guidelines is that A/B testing live web pages is the guidelines were created to minimize impact on search performance.
The guideline begins:
“This page covers how to ensure that testing variations in page content or page URLs has minimal impact on your Google Search performance.”
While Google does not explicitly forbid using A/B testing to test which page ranks better, the context of the guidelines itself is defined as protecting search performance; measuring search performance is not in the guidelines.
What Google’s document describes getting measured is consistently user behavior, not rankings.
On a side note, something that’s not in the guidelines is that there is no “right” button color and size for improving clicks on a call to action button. Longstanding SEO knowledge and experience about this is that large buttons and/or colors that contrast strongly against the web page backgrounds tend to get more clicks. This likely explains why Amazon’s Add To Cart button is a bright mustard color and Walmart’s version is bright blue contrasted against a solid white background.
Google’s Guidelines On A/B Testing
Google’s guidelines on A/B testing describe it as showing different versions of a website and collecting data on how users react to them. In terms of SEO performance it says not to expect any disruption but by allowing Google to index the slightly different pages once the testing is over the winning combination will be indexed much sooner.
There are two kinds of A/B testing:
- A/B Testing
Testing two or more changes to a web page. Google uses the example of testing different fonts on buttons. - Multivariate Testing
This is a test of multiple changes all at once in order to identify which combination of factors work best together. Google uses the example of testing different combinations of different fonts on buttons and on the web page itself.
Four Considerations For A/B Testing
Google also recommends four best practices:
1. Use The rel=”canonical” Link Attribute
This is probably the most important factor to consider. Using the rel=canonical link attribute enables site owners to put all kinds of variations of a web page online and still include a strong hint about which version of a web page is best.
2. Use 302 redirects
If you’re randomly redirecting users to different versions of a web page you should be using a 302 redirect, not 301 redirects. 302 means that a resource (like a web page) has been temporarily moved. That’s…
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