To keep search engines happy while we’re running these tests for our users, I’ve put together some key best practice tips to make sure that you can continue testing to maximize the performance of your site, without damaging it in the process.

1) Ensure Google Is Served the Primary Content of a Page That You Want to Rank With.

If you have a variant page where a section of key body copy has been removed, when the search engine accesses the page, nothing is left with which to assess the overall topic of a page and what it should rank for.

This also applies to instances where you’re swapping out sections of content.

I have seen tests where blocks of copy from subcategory pages were being inserted into the homepage, which caused cannibalization issues as the homepage started ranking for key terms associated with those lower-level pages.

Carefully assess key elements like title tags, body content, internal links, and images, and make sure search engines can access a version of the page where these remain intact.

The most important question to ask yourself about your website tests: will this affect how Google can crawl, understand, and index the content on the page?

Changing the size of the checkout button won’t affect this, but swapping out an H1 might, for example.

2) Don’t Create Pages That Are Too Distinctly Different From One Another.

Search engines are able to detect when there are minor changes between pages for testing purposes, and generally have no problem with this.

However, if the page variations differ drastically, this could be flagged as cloaking and earn you a manual action.

The page that search engines end up accessing should match the primary topic of the original page.

If your original page was targeting restaurant keywords, but the variant page is about life insurance, then this would be a big red flag for search engines.

3) Use the rel=”canonical” Tag for Pages That Have Different Test URL Variations.

If you’re running tests that create multiple page variants on separate URLs, Google recommends adding a canonical tag to specify the original page that should be indexed.

This helps to avoid search engines choosing another duplicate test page to index instead of the original page.

The canonical tag is only a signal and not a directive, so make sure other elements like your internal linking and sitemap URLs consistently point to the original page as well to give search engines a clear picture of which page should be indexed as the primary version.

4) Be Careful When Using Noindexing or Blocking Test URLs.

Adding a noindex tag to a page in a ...https://seos4all..com/2020/05/ab-multivariate-testing-for-seo-how-to.html?m=1