Recently, Google has provided a great insight into Website Testing
& Google Search. Taking into the queries about whether website
testing—such as A/B or multivariate testing—affects a site’s performance
in search results, Google has come up with a set of guidelines that are
significant for testing any website.
But before we cite the details, a little briefing on Website Testing is necessary.
Website testing means trying out different versions of your
website (or a part of your website), and gathering data about how users
respond to every single version. With this, one can ascertain which
version shows the best performance – which of the versions results in
the most purchases, or signups, or whatever you want the users to do.
Once the test is concluded, you can update your website with the best
content out of the lot.
A/B testing is running a test by generating multiple versions of a
page, each with its own distinctive URL. When users try to access the
original URL, some of them are redirected to each of the variant URLs.
In this way, you can assess the effectiveness of each page by comparing
the behavior of the users pertaining to different pages.
Multivariate testing is using software to change different parts
of your website quickly. With the help of variations you can test
multiple parts of the page; be it a heading, a photo, or the ‘Add to
Cart’ button, etc. The software will show variations of each of these
sections to users in varied groupings and then you can statistically
evaluate which of the variations are the most successful.
Now, we shall bring up the imperative guidelines for running an
effective test with minimal impact on your site’s search performance, as
stated by Google.
- No cloaking: Cloaking—showing one set of content to humans,
and a different set to Googlebot—is against the Google Webmaster
Guidelines, whether you’re running a test or not. It should be ensured
that you’re not deciding whether to serve the test, or which content
variant to serve, based on user-agent. It has to be remembered that
infringing Google Webmaster’s Guidelines can get your site demoted or
removed from Google search results. So, act wisely.
- Use rel=“canonical”: Google suggested that if you’re running
an A/B test with multiple URLs, you can use the rel=“canonical” link
attribute on all of your alternate URLs to indicate that the original
URL is the preferred version. Google recommend using rel=“canonical”
rather than a noindex meta tag because it more closely matches your
intent in this situation.
- Use 302s, not 301s: As per Google, if you’re running an A/B
test that redirects users from the original URL to a variation URL, use a
302 (temporary) redirect, not a 301 (permanent) redirect. This will
help in making search engines aware that this redirect is temporary
& it will only be in place as long as you’re running the experiment.
So, they should keep the original URL in their index rather than
replacing it with the target of the redirect (the test page).
JavaScript-based redirects are also satisfactory.
- Only run the experiment as long as necessary: The time
required for a trustworthy test depends on factors like your conversion
rates, and the amount of traffic your website gets. A good testing tool
should tell you when you’ve gathered enough data to draw a reliable
conclusion. Once the test is concluded, you should update your site with
the desired content variation(s) and remove all the elements of the
test as soon as possible, such as alternate URLs or testing scripts and
markup.
If Google discovers a site running an experiment for a needlessly long
time, it may construe this as an endeavor to mislead search engines and
thus, it will take the necessary action in view of that. This is
particularly true if you’re providing one content variant to a large
proportion of your users.
Google enunciates that all these recommendations should result in your
tests having little or no impact on your site in search results.
However, depending on what type of content you’re testing, it may not
even matter much if Googlebot crawls or indexes some of your content
variations while you’re testing. Furthermore, if Google crawls your site
often enough to notice and index your experiment, it will perhaps index
the subsequent updates you make to your site fairly fast once you have
finished the experiment.
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