Change URL or use Canonicals and Redirects?

[LindsayDayton]

We just completed a conclusive a/b test on a client's landing page. The new page saw a 30% bump in conversions, yay!

Now what?

Option 1: Change the url of the new page to that of the old page, retire the old page.

Option 2: Redirect the old page and anything that was pointing to it to the new page, make the new page the canonical.

I'm afraid of option 1 because I think Google's WTF penalty will be a bit harsher than option 2, but I wanted to sanity check that here.

Any thoughts or experienced advice would be very appreciated!

[Mark.]

Hi,

So if I understand correctly you AB tested with two pages (for example: domain.com/page and domain.com/testpage) and both were indexed by Google? If yes, than option 2 as you mentioned is the best way to go here.

For the future I would recommend to make sure that the testpage is not indexed by Google via robots.txt/meta noindex or use the rel canonical tag. You don’t want the testpage to get organic traffic here to prevent issues.

[LoganRay]

Hi,

You definitely want to avoid redirects where possible, so scratch option number 2. Redirection causes you to lose about 10% of the authority that page has built up. Google tends to prefer pages that they have known about for a while.

If you were to do option 2, you'd also have to update all of your internal links to point to the new page, as well as outreach to any external linking sites to have them update.

All you need to do is take the source code for the variation page and make it the source code for the original.

It sounds like you may have used Google Content Experiments. If that's the case, the additional URL created for your variation doesn't need to be excluded from crawls or disallowed, Google knows it's there and there's no other way to get to it other than the code snippet they utilize to send your sample to the variation.

[LindsayDayton]

Thanks. We did use Google Experiments, so your advice is very helpful.

Am I crazy in thinking that shifting a completely new page to an old and trusted URL is not going to hurt rankings a bit?

[LoganRay]

I knew it that sounded like a Google A/B test protocol!

A good rule of thumb is to avoid changing URLs unless it's absolutely necessary. There's a lot going on with that URL in the background that Google knows about....internal and external links as I mentioned above, but also XML sitemaps and usage metrics. You don't want to point them elsewhere and have them re-learn a new URL structure and step through a redirect just to get there.

Google has put more emphasis on UX in the last couple years, so improving the usability of this page, as you've done by A/B testing, is likely to benefit you in the long run.