{"id":116039,"date":"2018-05-29T08:47:39","date_gmt":"2018-05-29T08:47:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/staging.wingify.com\/blog\/ab-testing-seo\/"},"modified":"2026-09-15T14:27:39","modified_gmt":"2026-09-15T08:57:39","slug":"ab-testing-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wingify.com\/blog\/ab-testing-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"How to A\/B Test Without Jeopardizing your SEO Efforts"},"content":{"rendered":"

A\/B testing is an effective way to improve your site’s user experience and its ability to convert users to clients.<\/p>\n

While changes made to your site may impact your user\u2019s behavior, they are also seen by search engine crawlers, especially Google. The latter is perfectly capable of interpreting JavaScript, the scripting technology behind a lot of A\/B tests<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n

As A\/B testing experts, we are often asked about the impact of A\/B testing on our clients\u2019 organic search rankings<\/strong>. If SEO is not taken into account, an A\/B testing campaign can impact the visibility of the site, notably for tests based on URL redirects.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This post is a good opportunity to review A\/B testing best practices for SEO and help you do what\u2019s best when it comes to optimizing conversions, without jeopardizing your rankings and web traffic.<\/p>\n

General SEO recommendations<\/h2>\n

To start, let\u2019s review some general recommendations from Google.<\/p>\n

Google completely accepts A\/B testing and even encourages it if it\u2019s geared towards improving user experience<\/strong>. Google also offers its own client-side A\/B testing tool <\/a>(Google Optimize) that uses JavaScript to manipulate the DOM (Document Object Model) to create page variations.<\/p>\n

On its blog<\/a>, Google shares rules to be respected so that its algorithms do not penalize your site. The main rule concerns opening your test to the search engine\u2019s robots, who must navigate on the same version of your pages as your visitors.<\/p>\n

So, one of the first best practices for SEO is to not exclude Google\u2019s bot from your A\/B tests<\/strong>. Even if your A\/B testing solution offers some advanced user-targeting capabilities, like user-agent detection, do not use them to exclude Googlebot.<\/p>\n

It is also recommended that you do not display pages that are too different from one another to your users. For one, it will be more difficult to identify which element(s) had a greater impact on the conversion rate. Second, Google may consider the two versions to be different and to interpret that action as a manipulation attempt. Losing ranking may result or, worst case scenario, your site may be completely removed.<\/p>\n

Depending on your objectives, the A\/B testing setup may differ and each way of doing things can have an impact on SEO.<\/p>\n

Best practices for A\/B tests with URL redirects<\/h2>\n

A\/B testing using URL redirects, also known as split testing<\/a>, is one of these methods. Instead of using a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to design your variation, you redirect users to a completely separate page, often hosted on your site, that has its own URL. Using this method is justified if you have a lot of changes to make on your page; for example, when you want to test a different design or another landing page concept.<\/p>\n

This use case is the most prone to error<\/strong> and can have a dramatic impact on your search engine ranking, namely your original page being removed from the Google index, and replaced by your variant page. To avoid this, remember the following points:<\/p>\n