How To Perform An A/B Test Without Any Side Effects? A/B testing is an effective method for the conversion rate optimization of your site. If carried successfully, A/B testing/split testing can help you to drive more leads or conversions, and improve your sales. When done with errors, it can cost you your time , money, conversions and most adversely your search engine rankings. A/B testing creates confusion for search engine spiders. While performing an A/B test, you create a number of versions. Question is, which version would the search engines index? and which one they would rank? This confusion is big enough to cost you your ranking and your website’s traffic. Here, I am going to explain some ways using which you can avoid these side effects of A/B or split testing. How may a split test cost your Search engine ranking? Taking an example, say Google bots crawl your site for indexing it. After that, it sends the data to Google, and Google runs its algorithm to see where your page/site fits in the ranking. Meanwhile, Google notices that multiple contents on your site are present with some minor differences. They seem to differ slightly in contents, page copy, design and images. But, their URLs seem to be quite similar. In fact, they have the same URL.
Now, Google is obviously confused as to which it should consider for the rank in its SERP. Worst case scenario for this confusion would be that Google might penalize you for the duplicate contents and degrade your SERP. This is the reason why a Reckless A/B testing might cost you your Search engine ranking.
It does produce two reasons for why you should optimize your A/B testing for SEO? 1. To avoid the penalties caused by duplicate contentsGoogle panda is the algorithm which is responsible for penalizing the duplicate contents on the web. In a split testing since most of the contents in different variations are almost similar, it triggers the duplicate content warning affecting your ranking ultimately. 2. To remove the ambiguity in SERPHaving two similar versions of a page can confuse Google as to which page it should consider in its SERP. It might be possible that Google selects any of the versions randomly. So while doing an A/B testing you might unwittingly overlook the SEO considerations. How can you safely avoid these downfalls of the A/B testing? 1. Assist Google to index your original pagesBefore getting caught for duplicate contents, it better you yourself helps Google to identify your original pages which it will consider while ranking. If Google identifies your original version of the page, then it will ignore all the other versions while indexing and ranking. Add the HTML code like below in the <head> </head> section of your test web page <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://YourSite.com/ YourURL.html”> It will help Google identify your original web page. 2. Prevent indexing of test pages by GoogleThe most desirable way to avoid the confusion is to prevent search engines from indexing your test pages. A. Add a “No Index” In your test pages add the following tag in head section which will tell the search engines not to index the particular page. <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” /> This will make sure that search engines do not index the particular web page (test page).
B. Use of robots.txt Robots.txt is a text file which tells search engines about which page to index and which page to ignore. Modify your robot.txt file to specify which pages to index and which to ignore. 3. Do not run test for a very long timeOnce you complete your test and reach a conclusion, you should immediately stop the testing phase. It means that you should run your testing as long as necessary to get a clear result. Even if you take all the precautions, running test for a longer time may be seen by the search engines as an unethical measure and it is a trigger to start degradation of your pages in the SERPs. Split testing or A/B testing is no doubt a powerful tool for improving your conversion rates, leads and page traffic. However, a reckless approach can trigger the downfalls that are mentioned above in the article. Thankfully, there are ways to avoid those downfalls and enjoy the pros of your A/B testing tool seamlessly