This is a myth that A/B Testing hurts search engine rankings because it COULD be classified as duplicate CONTENT. The following four ways can be applied to ensure that you don’t lose the potential SEO value, while running A/B Tests.

Don’t Cloak − Cloaking is when you show one version of your webpage to Googlebot agent and other version to your website visitors.

Use ‘rel=canonical’ − When you have A/B Tests with multiple URL’s, you can add ‘rel=canonical’ to the webpage to INDICATE to Google which URL you want to index. Google suggests to use canonical element and not noindex tag as it is more in line with its intention.

Use 302 redirects and not 301’s − Google recommends to use the temporary direction method − a 302 over the permanent 301 redirect.

Don’t run experiments for a longer period of time − Please note that when your A/B Test is completed, you should remove the VARIATIONS as soon as possible and make changes to your webpage and START using the winning conversion.

This is a myth that A/B Testing hurts search engine rankings because it could be classified as duplicate content. The following four ways can be applied to ensure that you don’t lose the potential SEO value, while running A/B Tests.

Don’t Cloak − Cloaking is when you show one version of your webpage to Googlebot agent and other version to your website visitors.

Use ‘rel=canonical’ − When you have A/B Tests with multiple URL’s, you can add ‘rel=canonical’ to the webpage to indicate to Google which URL you want to index. Google suggests to use canonical element and not noindex tag as it is more in line with its intention.

Use 302 redirects and not 301’s − Google recommends to use the temporary direction method − a 302 over the permanent 301 redirect.

Don’t run experiments for a longer period of time − Please note that when your A/B Test is completed, you should remove the variations as soon as possible and make changes to your webpage and start using the winning conversion.