How To Perform An A/B Test Without Any Side Effects? A/B testing is an effective method for the conversion rate optimization of your site. If carried successfully, A/B testing/split testing can help you to drive more leads or conversions, and improve your sales. When done with errors, it can cost you your time , money, conversions and most adversely your search engine rankings. A/B testing creates confusion for search engine spiders. While performing an A/B test, you create a number of versions. Question is, which version would the search engines index? and which one they would rank? This confusion is big enough to cost you your ranking and your website’s traffic. Here, I am going to explain some ways using which you can avoid these side effects of A/B or split testing. How may a split test cost your Search engine ranking? Taking an example, say Google bots crawl your site for indexing it. After that, it sends the data to Google, and Google runs its algorithm to see where your page/site fits in the ranking. Meanwhile, Google notices that multiple contents on your site are present with some minor differences. They seem to differ slightly in contents, page copy, design and images. But, their URLs seem to be quite similar. In fact, they have the same URL.
Now, Google is obviously confused as to which it should consider for the rank in its SERP. Worst case scenario for this confusion would be that Google might penalize you for the duplicate contents and degrade your SERP. This is the reason why a Reckless A/B testing might cost you your Search engine ranking.