An A/B experiment allows you to test the performance of entirely different versions of a page. If content variations are light, your site could experience duplicate content issues.
Rather than run the risk of experiencing duplicate content issues when running A/B experiments, you may wish to implement one of the following:
- Guide Googlebot to your preferred version. Use canonicalization to support your original landing page. Specify your original page as the canonical URL in the <head> section of all page variations. Your 'link' tag should read as: <link rel="canonical" href="[original page URL goes here]">
- Block variations with a noindex meta tag. Add the 'noindex' value to your 'robots' meta tag to prevent a page from being indexed. Your meta tag should read as: <meta name="robots" content="noindex" />
- Hide page variations from robots. To prevent search engines from indexing your content, add the following code to your robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /page-variation.html
When Google finds duplicate content, it will choose only one page to show – this could make the position of your original page more volatile on search engine results pages, as Google switches between your original page and the newer variation.
And in the rare cases where Google believes that duplicate content is being shown to manipulate rankings or deceive users, it may penalise your site’s ranking or remove it from the Google index altogether.
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