Matt Cutts: Split Testing Is Perfectly Fine By Google

Matt Cutts: Split Testing Is Perfectly Fine By Google

One of the questions we get often get is: will my SEO rankings be affected by split testing. In short No… but it is always nice to hear this from Matt Cutts at Google. In a HackerNews thread about a website being treated as hacked by Google thought the A/B testing tool had triggered this.

Matt Cutts said recently in a tweet good things about A/B testing

A/B testing can be really helpful. A classic blog post from 2009: goo.gl/r45Xj Lesson: buttons get clicked more.

— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) April 15, 2012

Also in the HackerNews thread Matt said the following things about A/B testing:

  • I’ve been quite clear that there’s nothing wrong with A/B testing. In fact, less than a month ago I tweeted that “A/B testing can be really helpful” and included a link to best practices: https://twitter.com/#!/mattcutts/statuses/191658511149711360
  • Split testing is a perfectly fine form of testing and doesn’t have anything to do with the “this site was compromised” warning. That’s the high-order bit. If you want low-level/detailed info, we discuss this topic on our support page at http://support.google.com/websiteoptimizer/bin/answer.py?hl=… . Hope that helps.
  • The state of A/B testing has evolved quite a bit in the last six years though. If I were making a fresh video, I’d say: A/B testing is a perfectly fine thing to do. You can do A/B testing via either server-side or client-side technology. In both cases, don’t do anything special or different for Googlebot. Treat Googlebot just like any other user and don’t hard-code our user-agent or IP address.
Originally published May 07, 2012 - Updated January 03, 2018
Dennis van der Heijden
Co-founder and CEO of Convert.com, Dennis is a passionate community builder and out of the box thinker. He spends his time innovating to make Convert Experiences better. Learn about his journey as an entrepreneur and leader on the SaaS Club podcast.
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