Does Website Testing Affect Search Rankings?
When deciding on a website's format, layout, and structure, companies often test different versions to see which is most successful. The software allows you to track website visitors' activities on your website (or webpage) and see how users interact differently with each version. In this vital stage of web development, you can see which version leads users to do what you want them to do—whether that is purchasing, signups, sharing, etc. Similarly, A/B testing involves the creation of different versions of a page with separate URLs. Multivariate testing involves the testing of individual parts of a page—the location of hyperlinks, 'Buy Now' buttons, or images, for instance. You may have concerns that testing out variable websites or pages can negatively affect search rankings when it comes to SEO analysis. Small changes, such as font, text colour, button sizes, image placement, etc., may have a large effect on the effectiveness of your website navigation and conversion rates, but little on the search engine ranking if the body of the site remains largely unchanged. But there are certain steps to take that will encourage successful test running without damaging search rankings. Using "rel=canonical" is useful when performing A/B tests using variant URLs. This tag tells the bot that the different test pages are simply variants of the original URL and should be categorised with the canonical-tagged URL being the original. It is much more effective than using "noindex," and it is possible the original page may be dropped as a duplicate if a variant is chosen as canonical by the bot. Cloaking is when you present one variety of content to users, and another to the search engine. This is against Google's Webmaster Guidelines. So it's important to not show original content when the Googlebot user-agent appears. If you do cloak, this can have serious implications—you may be relegated to a lower search rank, or removed completely from the search results. Using a 302 temporary redirect as opposed to a 301 permanent redirect will ensure that search engines retain the original URL indexed and not the temporarily redirected test page URL. You should not spend more time than is necessary on your testing. Once the relevant data has been collected, collated, and analysed, and you have decided on the preferred webpage feature, page, or site, you should delete all test pages and variations. All alternate URLs, coding, and scripts should be removed to make sure your ideal page is indexed. Sites conducting needlessly long tests may be viewed as attempting to mislead search engines. Take the precautionary steps outlined, and you can run useful tests that will not negatively affect your search ranking, so you'll be able to improve the design of your website without a hitch.