A / B Split testing

[Stener]

If you have developed a server-side A / B split testing tool. How do you avoid that Google will think you are doing cloaking.

When a user enters www.xxxxx.com/xxxxxx/ he gets either version 1 or version 2 back from the server on the same url.

If the user does not accept session cookies he will always get version 1.

[brycebertola]

As long as you aren't targeting the search engine spiders and giving them special content, you shouldn't have to worry about "Cloaking". To my knowledge, all incidents are reviewed before they penalize a site so they would probably see no harm in simple split testing.

[Brett-Harland]

It might be a good idea to exlude bots from your experiment, and your results.

Check the user agent string for "(bot|spider)" and then serve them the original.

This way they still see the original, until you think that the variation has won.